


The First Law of Magic

by glam0urmuscles



Category: The Goldfinch (2019), The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: BPD, Boris isn't quite there yet, Canon Continuation, Canon-Typical Behavior, Drug Addiction, F/M, Gallerina Theo, I don't have a great idea of where I'm going with this, M/M, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Burn, Theo at least realizes he's not straight even if he's in denial, Theo having conversations with various people only some of whom are Boris, Theo is a Mess! No surprises there, but please don't assume that Boris has his act any more together, cw: overdose, mismatched love languages, there isn't a plot! just lots of Boris talking!, very slow burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-12
Updated: 2020-03-14
Packaged: 2021-01-29 03:47:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 22,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21403678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glam0urmuscles/pseuds/glam0urmuscles
Summary: Theo’s back from his travels but he’s still on a journey. Boris just wants to give him something he’ll be willing to receive.
Relationships: Kitsey Barbour/Theodore Decker, Theodore Decker/Boris Pavlikovsky
Comments: 86
Kudos: 155





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I put this in the tags but I'll tell you here too: this whole chapter is just Boris saying words. I don't know what a plot is.

**“Anyways, the secret is, always fix their attention _away_ from where the slippery stuff’s going on. That’s the first law of magic, Specs. Misdirection. Never forget it.” - _The Goldfinch_, p365** ****

**“[B]etween ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.” -p770**

I had been back at the shop full-time for just a single day when Boris popped up.

“Surprise!” he banged through the door, arms held out for an embrace that didn’t come because I was busy tallying the books. He clapped me heavily on the shoulder instead. “I am only here to see Popchyk, but I think I can spare a minute or two for you too.”

At the sound of his name in Boris’s voice, Popchyk’s insane yapping rang out from upstairs. As a senior dog, his list of ailments had grown from cataracts and foul breath to include short, arthritic legs that could no longer manage the stairs, so he spent most of his time up there. His ears sure worked, though.

“I am coming, Popchyk! Where are you hiding him, Potter? Has he been pissing on the fancy antiques? Naughty Snaps! We will teach you thing or two about the value of a dollar.”

The figures I’d been adding had flown out of my head. “He’s just upstairs. Hobie’s out, so you can…”

He didn’t wait for me to finish. “Boris is coming!” he called, taking the stairs two at a time.

The past year had been a whirlwind, and quite honestly I was looking forward to settling back in to my New York life. Making amends to Hobie and Pippa. Earning an honest living at the shop. Figuring out if it was worth continuing things with Kitsey. Maybe trying to make a friend or find a real connection somewhere. Surely even I could manage to do that in a city with more than 8 million souls.

As usual my plans hadn’t accounted for Boris.

He came almost immediately back into the shop, the little white dog cradled in his arms. Popchyk was beside himself with joy, licking Boris all over.

Boris was also beside himself with joy. “My own kids do not love me this much!”

“Well, do you love _them_ as much?” This came out crueler than I intended, but my brain had shorted out at the concept of him as a father, as it always did on the rare occasions when he brought it up.

He was unruffled. “Touche, Potter. Truthfully I do not see them so much. And of course we know about same amount of DNA between me and all my sons.” He smacked a loud kiss on Popper’s nose. “Including firstborn.” He set him on the ground.

“Don’t misunderstand,” he said, correctly interpreting the flabbergasted look on my face. “Astrid is a very passionate woman, and her body? Even after three babies? Amazing. You could not ask for better! But it is a long story about the kids. I’ll tell you one day. It makes me look quite heroic!” He slapped his thighs as he sat heavily in a nineteenth century vase-backed armchair that was actually one of the finer pieces we had for sale. I winced. “So! Tell me about you! You are finished with your great quest?”

“Yesterday.”

“Ah! So my timing is perfect. We will get dinner! Celebrate!”

“I have a lot to take care of here, actually.” I gestured at my ledger. It wasn’t that I wasn’t happy to see Boris, my oldest and dearest friend. The blood of my heart, or whatever he called us. But I had been focusing so completely on the idea of finally starting over, an honest man, and his presence didn’t mesh with my new straight and narrow path. I hadn’t even had a full day to start walking it. “You know Hobie’s no good at the business side of things.”

“Sure Hobie can add a few numbers? Or maybe you should do this on a computer like everyone else in the world. Ha! Even Polish Cleaning Service! Myriam can teach you if your fancy education left this out.”

In truth we had a computer in the back and I’d enter the numbers from the ledger into it later, but there was something comforting about the little leather-bound book, which was why Hobie and I had kept it. It felt more permanent, more stable. Like the shop was the one part of New York that remained unchanged since the day Welty had opened it. It didn’t hurt that the customers were charmed by its quaintness, either.

“I don’t mean just doing the accounts, Boris. The Winter Antiques Show is in a few weeks and I need to make an inventory of the stock we’re taking. And there are some shipments of smalls I need to handle before FedEx closes at 8. Plus there are still a bunch of bills that need to be paid.”

“But things are good, yes? All square, I thought.”

“Well, sure. Square _one_.” I flipped the ledger around to show him the day’s entries. All three of them, and one of those a return. “I had enough money to buy back the furniture with a bit left over to cover the shipping, and fortunately we’re up to date on the mortgage and taxes, but now I have to rehouse all this product, and I’ll have to pay to store all of it forever, and the taxes will be due again in a few months, and it’s not like business is going to suddenly start booming when we don’t have anything that special to sell, and…” I cut myself off, sensing my voice rising to a whine.

“Pfft, you need to eat something.” He stood, taking the ledger from me and closing it gently. “I always feel better when I eat something. My treat. Come, we will stop at FedEx on the way, and you will tell me about your travels.”

***

Oddly, I thought of Xandra while watching Boris dip his pierogi first in applesauce, then in sour cream.

“Your little Russki friend is voracious,” she’d complained once, a big word for her, probably her version of actually making an effort with me. She was poking around our empty fridge as though its shelves were bare because we’d eaten everything, and not because she and my father had never bothered to stock them in the first place. “You’d better watch out. First he eats us out of house and home, but he might gobble you up next.”

It was a warning that left me deeply uneasy at the time, despite trusting Boris absolutely. I hadn’t thought of it in years.

It wasn’t the last time she’d call Boris bad news, and of course she was neither the first nor the last to suggest that he was trouble. You didn’t need to stumble on the phrase “deviant peer influence” in the psychology journal you’d lifted from your shrink’s office to know that’s how adults perceived Boris in relation to me. He was the worldly, black-clad, chain-smoking menace to society, and I was his tragic, biddable lackey, once so promising but waylaid by trauma. That is, when adults bothered to notice us at all.

And Xandra wasn’t wrong, which may have been why her reproach had made the tips of my ears burn. Voracious was one of the best words you could use to describe Boris, really. It wasn’t just his food that he gobbled up. It was life, every lick of it. It was all the air in a room. All the thoughts in your head.

And now here he was, eating into my planned evening routine.

“Try with onions, Potter.” He spooned the caramelized onions onto his own pierogi and pushed the plate of condiments towards me. “Delicious! Which you would know if you had more than three bites. Cannot tell tales of adventure on an empty stomach!”

I obediently loaded a pierogi with onions and took a bite. He was right, it was delicious.

He nodded in approval and signaled for a waiter to refill our beers.

“So! Tell me about your gap year!”

I shrugged. “It was mostly boring. Which you already know.” We had texted, albeit erratically. “Lots of time in transit; lots of time suspended in between places that all start to look alike, eventually, with people who have led nearly identical lives.” I finished my pierogi. “New money, old money — it doesn’t matter. All the people who bought Hobie’s pieces were trying so hard to live a certain lifestyle. They never cared about the furniture itself, just the image owning beautiful things allowed them to project.” Which was why I had never felt particularly guilty swindling them.

“Ah yes, the bourgeoisie,” Boris nodded knowingly, as the waiter returned with fresh pints. “Concerned only with the value of their property.”

I laughed. “Some Commie you’ve turned out to be, with your $20,000 watch.”

“Am not a plutocrat!” He protested. “But,” he grinned slyly, “I _am _quite rich. Will go to the guillotine gladly when the revolution comes.”

I laughed again. Boris’s beliefs had always been so incongruous, cobbled together as they were out of the spare parts of a disjointed, continent-hopping childhood rife with a mix of erratic adult influences and self-taught, shallow knowledge. But he lived them wholeheartedly, so I always forgave him his capriciousness.

“I suppose I’ll be defenestrated out the window of my West Village townhouse too,” I allowed. Hobie had added my name to the deed as a Christmas present just a few weeks ago — his way of making sure I knew I was welcome to return.

“Ha!” Boris tapped his glass to mine with a grin. “To our inevitable downfall!” He took a drink, and paused for me to do so as well. “Must make it hard for you — not easy to convince people to part with their illusions.”

“No,” I agreed. “Not when all I was offering in return was money. Not much of an enticement when you have plenty of it. But a status item? Much more valuable than money to the rich.”

“But you are champion sweet talker, so you had much success. Za teebyá!” He tapped his glass to mine again. I drank without waiting for his cue. “Tell me the tale of your biggest triumph!”

I shrugged, feeling somewhat bashful under the beam of his full attention. “I don’t know about it being a triumph, but the hardest was a George I bureau-on-stand in Kuwait. The man who bought it worked for a member of the Emir’s family who had been building his collection in order to open a museum. I never would have sold it to him in the first place if I’d realized it wasn’t to furnish a palace — none of the pieces can withstand curatorial scrutiny.”

Boris was nodding along sympathetically, his eyes fixed on me. As though he had any sense of the quality of Hobie’s forgeries or the little ways they gave themselves away. For all of his thoughtlessness — his insensitivity, his complete inconsistency as a correspondent, the way he speaks over objections and ignores discomfort — when Boris decides to be with you in the moment he’s fully present in a way I’ve rarely experienced. Hobie has that ability. My mother had it too.

“There was no way to get the piece back without telling him I had suspicions about its provenance," I continued, "but this guy is terrified to let on that he may have purchased a fake. A real knock against his judgement, which could cost him. In the end the only way to do it was to find a comparable genuine bureau-on-stand, buy that, and arrange a behind the scenes trade so he could save face. I had to draw Hobie into it, which wasn’t even the worst part. Took over two weeks. I had to change my flight three times. And,” I took a grateful swallow of my beer, “the whole time without a drink. That was the real struggle.”

“How did you manage?” Boris looked pale at the thought. “Me? I would die. Or at least vomit on Emir and be executed for vomiting on Emir, so same result.”

“Pills, mostly. And as much cough medicine as I could get my hands on.” It felt grim to dwell on these addictions, not at all in keeping with the celebratory mood Boris had been trying to foster, but at least he was someone who understood. “And I might have vomited on an Emir and been executed too if it weren’t for Myriam’s help rescheduling flights. Thank her again for me, will you?”

“To Myriam!” he toasted. We drank. “I’m glad you contacted her,” he said, signaling for another round. “I told her, ‘Theo is very stubborn. I do not think he will take me up on my offer of help, because he sees this as penance and will choose to suffer even if it can be made easier.’ But I am glad to be wrong.”

“I was desperate.” I didn’t correct him about the real reason I hadn’t wanted to accept his help, which was of course that he was a criminal and enlisting him in my efforts to become an honest man seemed counterproductive. “It didn’t look like there was anything for days because of the baggage handlers’ strikes. I couldn’t have lasted. But she found me a seat on a charter.” I laughed ruefully. “Do you know how many drinks I had in the first five minutes aboard?”

“I would have needed at least five. One per minute.”

“Close. I had three. The welcome champagne, and two mini bottles of vodka. No mixer, just straight down the hatch. I think I horrified the other passengers.”

“Pfft, three is nothing!” He took the fresh beers from our waiter. “Better bring next round right away,” he told him. “We are very thirsty.” He pressed one in my hands.

We sat in silence for a moment, drinking deeply and contemplating the horrors of life in a dry country.

Boris recovered first. “So! On other end of spectrum, tell me about godless, drug-filled California. I still have not been.”

“Godless. Filled with drugs. Beautiful too, with lots of beautiful people, though fewer of them where I spent the most time. Silicon Valley, mainly.”

He nodded sagely. “Yes, I have seen this television show. Bad clothes and hair.”

“Overall too much sun for you, though,” I advised. “And too many earthquakes for me.”

“Ha! Were the earthquakes scary, Potter?”

I shuddered. “I’ve been in an explosion, Boris.”

An earthquake had hit a few hours after I arrived for my first trip to California. A tiny one, but it was enough to see me shaking and sobbing in my hotel bathtub for the better part of the afternoon. I spent the rest of that trip and all subsequent ones baked out of my mind just so I could function.

“Ah.” He reached across the table and gave my hand a short squeeze.

It was my turn to try and fix the mood. “The beaches were really beautiful though. The Pacific Ocean has an almost magical quality to it. It just feels, I don’t know, _more _somehow than the Atlantic. I wish I had been able to stomach a little more time there.”

“Where else did you like the beaches? Maybe I will plan a holiday soon.”

I thought for a moment. “Thailand. The whole country is just spectacular.”

“Ah yes, beautiful Thailand. I hear through grapevine you found something you like there?” The heavy wing of his eyebrows waggled lasciviously. “Good for you!” He clinked his glass with mine again.

“Fuck off, Boris.”

“What? Was worried for you. A whole year, Grand Tour around the world, and only sex with Snowflake once a month when you are visiting? Like conjugal prison visits.”

“What the fuck, Boris? How would you know that? Were you fucking following me?”

I didn’t like the idea of him keeping such close tabs, especially when he hadn’t even bothered to stay in regular contact. I liked the idea that he knew about Thailand even less.

The client I had been with at the time, a minor British aristocrat, wasn’t the kind of man you could say no to. Not when you were trying to convince him to resell you a George III mahogany sideboard he bought to replace one of his mother’s that he’d accidentally destroyed while drunk. (_Without _tipping him off that it was a fake, if you wanted to sell to anyone in his extensive family tree ever again.) So when he had invited me to a Full Moon Party I had joined him. And when he suggested we rent a beach house with some Australians we’d met at the Full Moon Party I agreed. And when he decided to order half a dozen Thai prostitutes to join us at that beach house I went along with it. And when those prostitutes didn’t end up being women?

Boris waved off the accusation of following me, or rather I suppose of having me followed, which meant it was almost certainly true. “You don’t need to be such a prude, Potter.” He flourished a hand from his shaggy black head to his well-shod feet. “Is just me. You forget I have known this about you for many years.”

Suddenly my tinnitus was back in full force. I pushed my glass away hard and, I suppose, staggered to my feet.

The next thing I knew I was standing outside in the bracing winter air, Boris shouting after me over the waves crashing in my ears. “At least take your coat!”

***

The next fifteen or so minutes passed in a blur, a series of impressions of the city as I stumbled through the streets. The buzzing of sirens. The smell of pot smoke and sound of laughter from a passing group of NYU students. The waft of cooking meat from a halal cart. The damp, hot fog from a subway grate. The disorienting nighttime light show available only to those who wear glasses, with neon signs and headlights and street lamps reflected from both in front and behind. The loud blast of a horn.

A firm hand grasped my wrist and yanked me backwards onto the sidewalk, returning me to the present with a jerk. A bus whizzed by inches from my nose, horn still blaring.

“OK that is enough of that.” Boris’s pale face was pinched and quite serious. He shoved my coat at me, but when I didn’t move to take it he draped it around my shoulders. “Whole life turned around and you’re still pulling this shit,” he complained, hand back around my wrist but eyes trained on the street. “You looked like you knew where you were going, but then you circled same block three times so I thought I better follow closer. Glad I did. Hey!” He shouted as he hailed a passing cab. When it stopped he opened the door and shoved me inside in front of him, none too gently. “West 10th and Hudson.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes, him glowering and me shivering and ashamed. The cab smelled faintly of fake pine combined with the musty funk of the heating vents at full blast. My glasses fogged up.

“Are you back with us?” Boris asked eventually, voice softer than before.

“Y-yes.” My teeth were chattering.

“Put your coat on properly,” he advised. “And here.” He pulled the scarf off his neck and passed it over.

“I will not say sorry,” he informed me as I gratefully accepted the scarf and struggled into my coat. Putting on an overcoat while already seated is not an elegant process. “For keeping tabs, I mean. Was mostly to make sure you did not die, which,” he held up a finger, “in my defense is very challenging ongoing project.”

I shook my head, remembering why I was mad at him. It must have been the shock of betrayal that had set me off, I reasoned. “Not OK. Doesn’t matter why, it’s not OK, Boris.”

He gave one of his easy Slavic shrugs. “OK so I am bad friend. Still not sorry. But for other thing, I will not mention again unless you bring it up first.”

My ears filled with static again, but there was nowhere to go. Still, Boris soldiered on with his monologue.

“I did not realize this was a big deal. And am not saying it is a big deal! Or that you have to call yourself a certain way, say this means this, or that means that. How you call yourself is a very personal thing, Sascha tells me. Oh yes!” He brightened, interpreting my ongoing horror as simple bewilderment. “Did I not tell you? I have become jailhouse visitor and confidant of Sascha. He is very smart. Very funny. You would like him, I think.”

“I doubt it.”

“Oh so you hold a grudge forever? Unlucky for me! But I did tell Sascha to come work for me when his sentence is done. Like I say, he is smart, though maybe not smart enough to be running own operation. So you will have to meet him sometime! In four years to be precise, maybe less with good behavior. Europe, eh? Lucky he was not caught in Miami!”

The cab slowed to a stop a few doors down from Hobart & Blackwell. Boris handed over a wad of bills without looking at the meter and was out the door and around my side of the car like a shot.

“Go take a long, hot shower, Potter.” He waved away the cabbie’s protestations and offers of change, slamming the car door as soon as I was out, then escorting me safely to the sidewalk, then to the door. “I wanted to show you something tonight but it will have to wait for tomorrow, so try not to get pneumonia again. Take some aspirins, maybe.”

I was still shivering, but I managed to open the lock to the store. “I’ll have some tea.”

“Tea! Good idea. And have our boy Snaps sleep on your chest like old times.”

He clapped me on the shoulder before turning away, starting down the street. “Same time tomorrow, Potter!” he called behind him. “No silly Antiques Show planning!”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Theo and Boris continue to be on different pages.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> He’s ticked off! He’s lonely! He’s anxious! He’s besotted! He’s confused! He feels belittled and neglected but horny! He’s mad as hell! He’s Theodore Decker! And on GOD I’m gonna make him be a gallerina.
> 
> Realistically not for a few chapters though.

It was, admittedly, an abrupt parting. Not that I wanted to invite him in right then. It didn’t make much sense, but I felt like a trust between us had just been betrayed. Boris had lied to me and cheated me and stolen from me many times in the past, and although he tearfully professed regret over these occasions and did what he could to make things right, they were still significant and serious betrayals. But I had forgiven him, mostly, and taken him into my confidence again; was vulnerable with him again.

Which was why — mechanically feeding Popper, taking a hot shower, downing a benzo, and curling up in bed — I felt oddly abandoned. Of course in the wake of the humiliation of such a public panic attack I was also grateful to be left alone to lick my wounds, but confession and honesty took me right back to Vegas. To Boris. In a way, they made me want him there. I’d never been fully open with anyone besides him about the extent of my addiction and trauma. Sure, other people _knew_, though not exactly because I’d opened up to them. Plus Boris understood fully, as an addict himself. He empathized. He knew when not to push.

On those specific topics anyway. Clearly not in general.

I woke up no worse for the wear from my coatless misadventures. I moved through the day on autopilot, keeping busy. I assessed some upcoming auction lots. I swept out the workshop. I tackled the Winter Antiques Show inventory. I dusted and shined the items in our window display. I was bright and breezy with everyone who came into the shop, which seemed to make Hobie suspicious.

“Is everything OK? You’re very… _up _today.”

“Just glad to be done with things, I think. Happy to be back to normal.” I gave him my best reassuring smile.

“If you’re sure.”

He left me alone after that, but he texted me once he’d gone to Mrs. DeFrees’s for the afternoon that I should let him know if I needed anything. Even just an ear.

I decided to close up early and take Popchyk on a quick walk. Hobie was right, I had been a bit _up_ all day, and I thought it might be good to burn off a little of my manic energy before whatever the evening would bring. I also felt a small bit of vindictive relish picturing how Boris would react to finding the shop shut up when he arrived. If he could be the one to decide when we would see each other, I could decide not to be there.

He reacted by lounging on the stoop, back against the locked front grate, chain smoking.

“You make fun of my expensive watch but at least I am on time!” said Boris, passing me his cigarette and lighting another for himself.

I took a deep drag. “Popper’s a slow walker these days.”

“Tsk! Blaming this perfect ball of fluff for your own bad timekeeping?” Boris pushed himself off the stoop and onto his knees to scratch a delighted Popchyk behind his ears, whispering something to the dog in Ukrainian before scooping him up. “Don’t need to walk any more tonight, sobachka. Boris will carry you.”

“We can just drop him here.”

“Nonsense! We are not going too far. Only stop or two on train. Be there like that!” With a snap of his fingers Boris set off confidently in the direction of West 4th Street, cigarette perched between his chapped lips. I trailed along somewhat stupidly, Popchyk’s leash still in my hand.

“But we don’t have a bag to put him in. Dogs need to be in bags on the subway.”

“Oh, and you love the rules so much?” He took the leash from me and wrapped it around his hand. “Relax, Potter. Only good things tonight.”

“Just thought you might be unfamiliar with public transportation.”

He laughed. “I told you I am not fancy! Besides, Gyuri is in Chechnya this week so no driver even if I wanted to impress you.”

The distance between the shop and the subway was negligible — less than that between Boris’s house and mine in the old days — but those few blocks somehow seemed much longer, full as they were of people. The West Village isn’t a part of town where two sharply dressed men with a small dog are conspicuous, exactly, but I still felt obvious somehow; as though, two abreast, Boris and I were just getting in the way of the undulating human river of tourists and students and commuters.

And then at every street corner there was a bicycle deliveryman or a turning taxi to dodge, and a hand lightly on my arm; on the subway platform, the same hand on my sleeve as the train pulled into the station. Not quite restraining, just there.

We got off the C at 23rd Street and headed west, comfortably silent except for when Boris paused to exchange a few words with some street person or other before handing them a fistful of bills. The elderly bum half blocking the stairs out of the station, the strung-out lady with a shopping cart, the young crust-punks panhandling outside a drugstore whose rottweiler wanted to befriend Popchyk. All of them received a few dollars and a winning smile.

“Direct giving,” Boris explained. “More impact than one of those fussy fundraisers I bet Snowflake likes.”

I snorted. “Is that so?”

“What?” He elbowed me. “You judging? You think, ‘Oh Boris, they will only spend on drugs and drinking.’ I will also only spend on drugs and drinking! And me, I have an early day tomorrow. Better to spread it around.”

I laughed along with him, but I was thinking how easily those kids could have been us ten years ago. How the strung-out lady could still be us in the future.

The shops disappeared as we approached 10th Avenue, giving way to retrofitted warehouses. I was familiar with this part of Chelsea, despite it being a bit outside my usual art sphere of antiques and Americana. Kitsey liked it. She had friends who worked in galleries. Who owned them.

“Are you taking me gallery hopping?” I asked, amused. “It’s not a Thursday.”

“You will see!”

There were still plenty of people near the High Line despite the dark and cold and the lack of open galleries, but past the park the crowd thinned. We were the only people in sight when Boris stopped in front of a vacant storefront with a large, darkened window and pulled out two identical keys. He tossed me one, and used the other to unlock a battered metal door.

“Here it is, my latest investment!”

We stepped inside and he flicked the light switch, illuminating a medium-sized open room with white walls and polished concrete floors. It seemed obvious enough what it was, given the neighborhood and the white cube space we were standing in.

“Do you like?” Boris asked, lowering the dog to the floor. Warm and rested from his time in Boris’s arms, Popchyk ran off to sniff the walls and investigate corners.

“A gallery?” I asked.

“Of course!”

“But… why?” I was careful to avoid asking too many questions about Boris’s business, but if he was still fronting stolen paintings I assumed he was at least savvy enough not to try something as stupid as hiding them in plain sight.

“For art!” He gave a quick spin in the center of the room, hands spread. “To display and to sell. You like art, yes?”

“Well, sure. But I didn’t think you did.” He had been pretty dismissive about the merit of the other paintings recovered alongside my _zolotaia ptitsa_, especially the modern ones. And unless he _was_ planning to deal stolen art, then modern and contemporary was what he’d likely be representing. New blue chip galleries don’t pop up out of nowhere. No Old Masters for him.

“Well,” his face broke into one of his roguish grins, half fairytale prince, half fairytale wolf, “I do love the money. And you love the art enough for both of us! Can pick what you like, yes?”

“I don’t think you understand how different antiques and art really are, on the business side. I don’t have that background; living artists are a whole separate thing. Besides, why am I picking the art for your gallery?”

He flicked the side of my head in his familiar manner. “Look at key, tupitsa! Gallery is for you. Well, for us. Know you do not want to sell drugs or smuggle, but here is a way for us to be in business together. We work together, make nice money, spend quality time.” He puffed his chest out proudly. “Thought of it myself! Well, Myriam suggested. And found space. But it is a good idea, yes?”

“I don’t want to work for you.” My blood had turned to ice in my veins at the very idea, and this chill was evident in my voice.

Boris took a step back. “Not asking you to work for me! We will be equal partners. We can figure out details together. Maybe run it ourselves—could be nice for you to get out of dusty shop a few nights a week, host nice openings with free wine and lots of people? Or maybe hire some cute girls instead and we are silent partners. Up to you!”

“Well in that case I’m not interested in helping you launder money, or whatever this is.”

“No laundering money! All clean!” He placed his hand on his heart. “I swear this on my life — bought this place with reward money from the paintings. I know you do not want to be involved in—” air quotes—“criminal activity. I would not do that to you.”

“Then what’s your angle here? I already have a full-time job. More than, if you count buying trips and exhibiting at shows.”

Boris spread his hands in a gesture of concession. “Do not mean this to be a burden, truly. Want this to be nice activity to do together. Like old times, but more profitable. We will be partners!”

That was, I suppose, the crux of it. There had always been something tying us together. Be it shared circumstance as in Las Vegas, or the painting—that most fateful of fateful objects—for all the years afterwards. Now what was there? In a way I understood and shared his desire to find a new commonality to justify our continued association. But I also distrusted this scenario.

“Partners?” I laughed bitterly. “Really? I won’t constantly be left alone in New York to handle everything? And when a question about the business comes up you’ll respond to my messages? Return my calls? Because that’s the bare minimum of what it would take for us to be _partners_, Boris.”

“Ah,” he said, taking another step back. “I see now. I’m sorry but you know I cannot always respond right away! Sometimes have to leave personal phone behind for a few days when I go on a trip. If emergency you can always contact Victor or Shirley or Myriam — they can reach me.”

“If they can reach you why can’t I reach you? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“They will know where I am and what I am doing, Potter. Call hotel, leave message at car rental, et cetera. You don’t want to know this, correct?”

I stuck my chin out defiantly. “Maybe I do,” I said, even though I didn’t. “If you get to have me followed and know where I am at all times, maybe I want the same courtesy.”

He sighed deeply and rubbed between his eyes. “I don’t have you followed. Pfft! Of course I don’t do something so time consuming and boring! You know how I know your travels? I ask Myriam — she has your frequent flyer numbers from time she helped you. So exact same courtesy, if you want to split hairs.”

“But —” _How does that explain everything you know about where I’ve been and what I got up to while I was there? What happened to your claim that you were checking to make sure I’m safe? _”—the point is that it’s invasive. You could just ask me what I’m up to, you know.”

He laughed. “You are a real piece of work, you know this Theo?”

“I’m a piece of work? Christ, Boris, have you met yourself?”

“Not arguing! We are both pieces of work! But the difference between us? Is that if you wanted to know more about my life I would tell you gladly. But you don’t want to know, not really, so I keep you away from all that. But you? If I asked you? You would shut me out so fast I would go spinning all the way back to Australia.”

“How can you know that if you never actually ask me? You can’t just decide you know what I need! I don’t need to be—” air quotes, from me this time— “handled.”

He threw his head back with a howl of laughter, but there was nothing of his usual merry abandon in it. “How can I know this? I try to have conversation with you and you run off and try to kill yourself rather than talk! But,” he gestured around the empty gallery as though addressing an invisible crowd, “he does not need to be handled.”

“Oh fuck off. That was an accident. I haven’t actually tried to kill myself in years.”

“One year,” he corrected, expression grave but his eye contact defiant. “You are such a champion liar you forget the times when you have told me the truth.” Like I was capable of forgetting the heavy hours of candor in his Antwerp loft.

“Not the point!” Truly indignant now, my raised voice set off a round of barking from Popchyk. “I don’t want a babysitter!”

“Who is babysitting you? Told you I did not follow you anywhere.” Boris held his hands in tight fists at his sides.

Our restrained physicality just made me angrier. There was nothing in that empty, white room to throw at him. There was no convenient place to wrestle. Our long estrangement made touch less natural, and our adulthood had made heedless violence similarly strange. Or at least my adulthood had. I imagine Boris would be deadly now if he decided to strike, but despite the bitterness in his voice he seemed bent on deescalation, taking a step back for every angry step I took forward.

“The whole way here you were acting like I was about to run in front of the nearest car!”

“How am I acting this way?” he asked, genuinely puzzled, like he hadn’t put an ounce of thought into his restraining touches. “And even if I was can I help if I don’t want you to be dead?”

“So you’d send one or two less text messages each month. What difference would that make in your life, really? I’m sure you’d get over it!”

Boris spat, actually spat, on the floor in disgust. “Not care if you died? How can you say this to me? When you _know_ I would have…” he trailed off, flexing his fists at his sides. “And you accuse me in same breath of protecting you too much, which is how I know your smart professor getup is just a fancy costume.” He took a steadying breath. “You are my dearest friend, my brother.I want you to be safe and happy. What can I say to convince you of this?”

“You’re missing the point!“ I roared. In the course of our argument I had backed him up nearly to the wall; there was nowhere left for him to retreat.

“Then tell me!” he roared back. “What is the big point you are trying oh so hard to make? Maybe I am even stupider than you because I am confused!”

“When was the last time we spoke?”

“We are speaking now!”

“On the phone I mean. It was July, by the way. And the last time we texted was November. _November, _Boris. I did wish you a Merry Christmas but you never responded, so I figured you were gone from my life again. And then you showed up yesterday in the shop and…” Hot, angry tears were prickling the corners of my eyes, but I refused to let them spill over. “Suddenly you want to spend time together, and you have this grand scheme, and — You can’t just expect me to go along with everything you want, when you want it!”

Had I been a remotely diligent psychological patient over the years I might have been more effective at articulating and setting the boundary I was trying to express. _I don’t know how much space to leave for you in my life, and it’s unfair. This is imbalanced. You can’t demand my time and emotional intimacy on your terms alone._

As it was, Boris latched onto the wrong part of what I was saying, as he had been doing all evening.

“Not meant to pressure. It is gift! You have spent your reward, but who deserves this more than you? I want to share my part, to make things right…”

“I’m not—” I cut him off, taking his lapels in my fists— “some homeless woman who needs your charity!”

Boris’s expression shifted. “No,” he replied calmly, raising his arms not to strike but to gently clasp the back of my elbows. “You are well-to-do white man with big safety net of people who care about you and wish you well. I am one of them, even if you cannot see.” His thumbs made comforting circles. “That is all I mean by this. No charity.”

Though his words and his touch stilled me, this pause gave me space to consider the picture we presented to any passersby, silhouetted as we were in the brightly lit window. Boris’s gaze tender and his arms nearly around me. Me, red-faced and grabbing at his coat. The fact that the street had been deserted when we entered the gallery hardly mattered.

I pushed him roughly away from me, his back bouncing lightly against the wall.

“You want me to tell you about my life, but you don’t want to talk to me, and you definitely aren’t listening to me. I don’t _want_ this. And do NOT follow me! I’m not about to throw myself in front of a train.”

At least this time I remembered to take the dog with me when storming out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was a very difficult chapter to write for multiple reasons, and I'm not sure I've made Theo and Boris's argument especially believable. Mostly it was tough because these boys are MOONY AF over each other and I wanted Theo to accept Boris's gesture in the tender spirit with which it was intended. But it was also hard because I wanted to hew as close to canon as possible, in terms of the potential pitfalls of an actual Boreo relationship. And I think Boris is just as fucked up as Theo and has emotionally neglectful relational patterns he picked up in childhood that, uh, I can’t see Theo being super into.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which more people suggest that they might conceivably care about Theo and be interested in hearing about his thoughts and feelings, so he decides he is also in a fight with them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, there is no plot to this story. It is just Theo Decker having conversations with a variety of other characters while sitting in or walking through an assortment of locations. 
> 
> Sorry, no Boris in this chapter.

A month or so later, Kitsey and I broke up over Valentine’s Day dinner.

She had let me pick the restaurant, and I’d chosen a new Italian trattoria in the Bowery helmed by a quasi-famous chef. It was neither the type of established, Michelin-starred place she preferred nor one of the failing, third-generation Mom and Pop joints that Hobie and I favored. I thought of it as neutral ground, but for Kitsey—who always tried so hard to make the best out of everything, especially in public—it was an experience to mine for charming cocktail conversation with friends who rarely ventured below 14th Street.

“Isn’t this darling,” she cooed as the hostess led us to two seats on the end of a long, communal table.

“I didn’t realize the seating was like this or I would have chosen something else,” I said apologetically. Kitsey had lately been hinting that I put up barriers to intimacy, and here I was, making Valentine’s dinner reservations at a restaurant with communal tables.

“No, I adore it,” she assured, allowing me to help her out of her coat and into her chair, since this wasn’t the type of place where a waiter would pull it out for her. “Now we can see what everyone’s eating. It all looks so delicious!”

We settled on splitting a few of the lighter, more vegetable-forward starters followed by an assortment of pastas, ‘for balance.’ Kitsey photographed each plate with her phone as it came, in addition to taking multiple pictures of the restaurant itself.

“Next time the waiter comes by we should ask him to take a picture of us,” she said. “Toasting, maybe, if you still have any wine left.”

I lowered my nearly empty glass. “Why?” There were so many photographs of us in the society pages alone, I hardly saw why we’d need more.

“To commemorate the occasion, silly! And you know Mum would love it.”

“Only if you promise it’s just for your mother.”

She pouted prettily. “No fun! Then how will Suze and Dean or Vanessa and Chip know to be jealous of us?”

“Because you’ll tell them all about it next time you see them.” Whoever they were. I could hardly keep track of half of Kitsey’s circle, no matter how many times we were introduced. “You know I don’t like to have pictures of myself on the internet.”

My aversion to social media—which Kitsey adored—was an old chestnut between us. I didn’t have a single registered account, and used the shop’s email address anytime I needed to buy or book something online. Kitsey, on the other hand, had some 20,000 people following her on Instagram, which she assured me wasn’t even very many. My refusal to post pictures of my world travels over the past year drove her absolutely mad. Something about a waste of good content. Platt told me she had shared a few snapshots that I’d texted to her, captioned with unbelievably saccharine sentiments about how much she missed me. I never looked to see.

“Really, Theo.” Annoyance had crept into her bright, tinkling voice. “I’ll never understand why you of all people won’t use social media.”

“Why me of all people?”

“Well for one I’ve never met someone more concerned than you are with other people’s opinions of you. I know you think opening up a window into your life will make it harder to control how people see you, but I assure you that it’s quite the opposite. With the internet you can present a carefully curated image to the world, and over time…”

“I’m not obsessed with the way people see me,” I bit out, swallowing the rest of my wine.

Kitsey’s expression smoothed as she quickly recalibrated. “Of course not. I’m sorry, darling. Just ignore me!” She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “After all, this isn’t the place.”

“Oh no?” Whatever image fixations Kitsey might accuse me of, I didn’t share the strength of her revulsion to public unpleasantness. “Should we wait until we’re home? I don’t mind if these people hear us.”

She cast a glance at the couple next to us, deep in their own conversation. “I’m sure they would prefer to enjoy their meals in peace,” she said diplomatically. I dropped it.

I dutifully submitted to the ordering, photographing, and consuming of a heart-shaped chocolate lava cake to close out the meal, but my mood had been soured by the discord between us. Although our engagement was still suspended, since I returned to New York we had been trying to find a new rhythm and make things work. Lazy Sunday brunches, family dinners, happy hours with her coworkers, romantic weekend outings — most of them ending in her bedroom or mine. We really had been trying quite hard. Or at least, everything we did _felt_ effortful.

“Why don’t we take a stroll in the park?” Kitsey offered as I paid the check. “It’s warm for February and I’m not ready to go home yet.”

The thought of sweet, Upper East Side Kitsey wandering Tompkins Square Park after dark in her pink Celine coat made me raise an eyebrow, but I agreed, saying a brief mental prayer that we wouldn’t cross paths with any of my drug friends.

The park was just a few blocks away, and we strolled there arm in arm. There weren’t many people around: small clutches of the expected drug-addicted homeless, a few teens playing basketball, some people walking their dogs. No one I recognized, or who might recognize me.

It was Kitsey who broke the silence between us.

“Theo, have you given any thought to what you really want?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” she hesitated, choosing her words, “you told me last month that you want things to go back to the way they were, so of course I agreed to try for that. And don’t misunderstand me — we’ve been having a very nice time together!”

“But,” I prompted grimly.

“But,” she agreed, with a squeeze to my arm. “But the moment we’re trying to get back to… Well, was it all that wonderful to begin with? I know we got swept up in it, and it felt like pure bliss for a few months that summer. But I was still… And you were still… You _are_ still, if I’m not mistaken.” Typical Kitsey, acknowledging the multiple elephants in the room, but stopping short of naming them. In a way it was one of the reasons we were so well matched.

“Please don’t look so sour, Theo! I’m not chastising you. I’m just saying that we should figure out what we want to be to one another and work towards that, not towards some… some hormone-driven honeymoon phase we’ll never be able to recapture.”

“That sounds sensible,” I allowed.

She laughed. “Oh good, _sensible_. High praise.” She squeezed my arm again. “But I’m glad you agree. There’s actually someone new at Dr. Martin’s practice who comes highly recommended, and not just by Dr. Martin.” Dr. Martin being Kitsey’s psychologist. “She specializes in couples therapy.”

I stopped walking. “No.”

“You didn’t let me finish.”

“I sensed where you were going. And I’m not talking to some shrink about our relationship.” I threw up my hands in frustration, dislodging her. “We’re doing fine!”

“Are we? So that incident last week with my godmother, or when Tom turned up at brunch, or your complete inability to even… you know… recently? Those are all examples of us doing fine?”

“We can talk about those things without someone else listening in, judging us.” It was humiliating enough to even have her mention that last one to me.

“That isn’t what therapy is, which you would know if you’d ever go!” Though she would have still appeared cool as a cucumber to someone who didn’t know her, Kitsey was as visibly upset as I ever saw her, grey eyes stormy and her arms crossed over her chest. “A therapist is just a facilitator, helping you to talk about the things you want to talk about.”

“Well in that case, there’s nothing I want to talk about.”

She eyed me coolly. “I don’t want us to go on like this, not being candid with one another. Honesty and vulnerability are necessary for intimacy…”

“I said I wasn’t interested in therapy, so please don’t bring maxims from Dr. Martin into this.” I strode off again.

Kitsey was still and silent for a few moments before following. “If that’s really how you feel, Theo, then—” she took a deep breath and put her hand back on my arm, stilling me— “I don’t see a way forward for us. I’m sorry. Really.”

Silently, I walked to the nearest bench and sat down, resting my head in my hands. Kitsey sat solicitously beside me.

It wasn’t that I was heartbroken by the end of our relationship, which as Kitsey rightly pointed out was hardly perfect. It wasn’t even that it was sudden. If anything, our breakup had been an almost absurdly protracted one, and she was smart to put a firm end to our affair rather than allowing it to continue floundering over the next several months or years. What did surprise me was her being the one to end it. I wanted it to work, sure, but somewhere in the back of my mind I had always assumed that it would peter out naturally. Or, that once I found my footing I would meet someone new who could help me to be the Theo I wanted to be in the future, not the Theo I had been trying to be in the past. And yes, there was still some wild, romantic part of me that entertained the thought that Pippa would change her mind, or that—perhaps at the wedding itself—a conscientious objector might show up and whisk me away from normality and domesticity and into the bonfire.

“Theo, say something please.”

I’m not sure whether she expected me to argue, to vow to do better, but I wasn’t in the mood to fight the inevitable. I picked my head up from my hands.

“Here’s looking at you, Kits,” I deadpanned, eliciting a surprised bark of laughter from her. 

“Oh Theo,” she said, her eyes gleaming in the light of the lamps along the footpath, “I _am_ glad we tried.”

To this day I’m not sure I would classify what Kitsey and I did together as ‘trying,’ but perhaps that says more about my mindset than hers. Certainly psychology journals, women’s magazines, and the popular press are all in agreement that women invest more effort into the health of their relationships than their male partners, so we probably weren’t atypical in this regard. Still, beneath my general surprise I also felt something like relief—I finally had permission to stop trying to make myself be in love with her—and I took Kitsey’s olive branch in the spirit with which it was offered.

“Me too.”

We sat for a few minutes, her head resting against my shoulder,until we grew too cold. _This is the last time you will sit together like this. You should remember it_, I thought. Anticipatory nostalgia, it’s called. I wanted to be the type of person who felt it for this moment. 

When I began to lose feeling in my fingers I stood, helping her to her feet. “Let’s get you in a cab.”

“Can I be frank for a moment?” Kitsey asked as we waited at the edge of the park for a taxi with its light on. I hesitated. “It’s something I’m saying from a place of love, I promise.”

I shrugged, resigned.

“I understand that there are some things you might not feel comfortable talking about with me.” She held up her small hands, fingertips pink from the cold, heading off my protest. “I’m not nagging you about therapy! I’m only saying, you should have other people you can talk to. No one person can be everything to you; that’s always been something I worried about with us. You’re looking for someone to be your lover, your family, your best friend — it's a lot to expect from one relationship. It’s good to have family for some things, a partner for others, and friends for all the rest.” _And a therapist, and a lover on the side_, I thought somewhat bitterly.

A taxi pulled up and Kitsey stood on tiptoe to kiss me on the cheek. “That’s all. I understand if you don’t want to come around right away, but please don’t be a stranger either. We do love you, you know. We’d hate to have you disappear again.” She climbed gracefully into the car. “I mean it. Please don’t mope, Theo.”

Silently, I closed the door behind her. She wiggled her fingers at me as she drove away.

Instead of hailing the next cab to come by, I lit a cigarette and began to walk west, turning over Kitsey’s words in my mind.

Here was yet another example of how I love in the wrong way.

I’d always known it, but the criticism hurt. Maybe I do expect too much while giving too little. Maybe, like my dad, I am also “emotional quicksand,” a colorful phrase I once overheard my mother whispering over the phone after a fight — a swirling vortex of need and volatility; a sucking, all-consuming quagmire with the deceptive outward appearance of solid ground. I may try not to overburden others with my internal monologue, but I know that’s never really prevented them from getting caught in the emotional crossfire. I can be a lot for one person to handle, but the truth is I _do _want my partner to be my closest friend, my family — and maybe this desire to spend significant amounts of time with someone can come off as clingy, or needy. Still, it didn’t seem like an unreasonable thing to want, did it?

But then again, maybe my faults as a partner—my aloofness, my neediness, my recent failures at intimacy of all varieties—were just further confirmation that Kitsey wasn’t the right person for me. Shouldn’t people be able to expect their partner to be their lover, their best friend, and their family? Was compartmentalizing really any better? Any healthier? Well fuck healthier, it wasn’t for me. Surely some people know how to survive quicksand. As children in the desert, Boris and I had of course expected to encounter it at any moment, and had researched how to rescue ourselves accordingly. Don’t panic. Stay very still. Grab something or someone solid and slowly haul yourself out, or have them haul you out. Never mind that the desert is the last place you’ll ever encounter quicksand.

By the time I made it back to the shop, I had worked myself into a state of righteous indignation. I wasn’t even sure who I was angry at. Kitsey, who had bowed out of our relationship with a ballerina’s preternatural grace? Boris, with whom I’d had a similar argument just last month — who simply wasn’t _there_ enough —and who hadn’t bothered to check in once since I stormed out of the gallery? My mother for dying and leaving me so clingy, so terrified to lose anyone else, yet so closed off? The other adults in my life, who taught me that safety depended on not making waves, so now admitting I have needs still feels like a failure? Myself?

Whatever the answer, it wasn’t Hobie, who nonetheless was the unfortunate bystander caught in that evening’s emotional crossfire.

He was sitting quietly in the living room when I slammed through the door, a glass of scotch in hand and a melancholy look in his eye.

“Theo.” He straightened his hunched shoulders to receive me. “I didn’t expect you back so early. How is Katherine?”

“Fine, as always,” I grumbled, shrugging out of my overcoat and hanging it on the stand with enough force to knock it sideways. I caught it and righted it.

“Ah,” he replied knowingly, though he couldn’t have read the parade of gloomy thoughts marching through my miserable mind. “Can I offer you a scotch?”

“Please.” I slouched over to the sofa and slumped there as Hobie went to the bar cart and poured a few fingers into a glass. Never one to dispense unsolicited advice, he passed me my drink and resumed his seat. We drank silently for a moment.

“Did you know,” Hobie began cautiously, “that Valentine’s Day used to be a very special occasion in this house? It was the day Juliet — Pippa’s mother — came to live with us. Well, she actually came much earlier, the summer before. But February was when all the legal arrangements were official. And it was already a holiday.” He laughed a little ruefully. “I’m not sure I ever mentioned that it was also our anniversary, Welty and me, cliche as it was. We both hated that.” He shook his head to clear it, correcting himself. “No, I actually know I never mentioned it, because we’ve never spoken about it, though you must have guessed about us.” He took a sip of his scotch. “We’ve never told each other very much, have we Theo?”

Hobie seemed to me to be veering awkwardly close to all the other conversations turned arguments I’d had lately. _Tell me what’s wrong, Theo. Talk about your feelings, Theo. Open up. Confess_. Already irritated, this raised my hackles and I silently drank most of the scotch in one go.

Hobie eyed me with concern, but continued. “That’s my fault, I suppose. Foolish to think you would come to me to talk, that you would be open with me when I was never open with you—” a thoughtful pause— “What I’m trying somewhat awkwardly to say is that I know it isn’t our usual, and I know you may not want to pour out your heartaches to an old man, but…”

“No.” I finished my scotch and slammed my glass directly on the coffee table, sans coaster, a gesture at once aggressive and passive-aggressive. “I don’t.”

Hobie, peaceable, even-keeled Hobie, refused to take the bait. “Alright. I’m not demanding anything, Theo, but I’m offering an ear if you wanted to talk.”

“I don’t.”

“Alright. In that case—” he stood, gathering up my glass with his own, still half full. He wasn’t offering me a refill— “why don’t you head upstairs? Have a shower? I left Popper up there, snoring away, all curled up on scarf.” Boris’s, no doubt. I still had it. “Things will look brighter in the morning.” He clapped me on the shoulder and made his way to the kitchen, leaving me alone to collect myself. I stewed for a few minutes longer before taking his advice and heading up to bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would 100% follow Kitsey on Instagram, and frankly I’ve gone and made myself sad that I can’t. She is a joy to write. In the (only?) wise words of Theodore Decker, “All I could think was Kitsey, Kitsey, Kitsey!” What a queen.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Due to circumstances that are entirely his own fault, Theo is forced to sit still and have a whole conversation with someone without storming out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is extremely self-indulgent. What was that tweet about the real fantasy of fanfiction being the ability to force grown men to work on their issues? I think about that all the time.
> 
> Major content warnings for overdose and vomiting. It’s definitely Theo’s rock bottom (vis a vis addiction, anyway). I have a lot to say about this chapter, so please see endnotes for more.

The black cloud that had descended during my walk home didn't lift the next day, or the next. It was different than the yawning void of meaningless that has overtaken me from time to time since childhood — the certainty of decay, the futility of human effort, the absolute nature of loss. This was more of an irritation-punctuated despair. My loss of Kitsey and the promise of respectable normalcy she embodied, though both expected and unlamented, reinforced my belief that I was made to lose, made to be left behind and to live alienated from my fellow man. I was the twitchy sort of miserable: sad and angry and anxious all at once.

This mix of nerves and listlessness saw me shut up in my room more often than not, annoyed with myself. After a week consumed by this I felt I had little choice but to increase my intake of the one thing that made me consistently calm and functional. My baseline usage wasn’t exactly low, so where this led was probably inevitable.

***

It wasn’t the first time I had woken up on the bathroom floor, sore and bloody, but it was the first time I had done so with Hobie kneeling over me, syringe in hand.

“Oh thank God,” he said as I sat bolt upright with a gasp, my chest on fire, my head crushed in a vise, and my intestines liquid. He threw himself aside as I lurched for the toilet and vomited abundantly. Narcan was just as violent an experience as Boris had warned.

Hobie waited patiently, a steady hand on my shoulder, as I brought up what little I had eaten that day. When at last there was a pause in my retching he helped me sit back against the doorframe and passed me a hand towel.

“The Narcan will wear off in an hour or so,” he informed me gravely as I dabbed at my mouth, “but the drugs stay in your system for longer, so you need to stay awake, and you need to be watched. That’s non-negotiable, but I’ll let you choose. Hospital? Or here? I’d advise hospital, since I’m not a medical professional.”

“Here,” I croaked out. I didn’t want to go to the hospital. I was afraid they’d never let me leave.

He nodded, mouth a grim line. “The training only covers signs of overdose and how to give an injection, so I’m afraid if you pass out again then it’s going to be the hospital anyway. Can you stand?”

I hadn’t realized Hobie even knew about my habit, much less that it was serious enough that he should get Narcan training, though I didn’t have the wherewithal to mull over these mysteries until later. In the moment I took his question as a challenge I needed to meet in order to avoid institutionalization, and I attempted to haul myself up by grabbing onto the door. I was shaking too badly to have much success until Hobie got an arm around me. My violent trembling nearly knocked us both sideways several times as we staggered towards my room. I had always thought of him as a giant, but struggling under my bulk he seemed diminished and old.

“Are you sure about this? You’re practically convulsing.”

“Just withdrawal,” I rasped, as though the ghastliness of what I was feeling could be minimized. I really, really didn’t want to go to the hospital.

After safely depositing me on the bed, Hobie pulled over my desk chair and sat. “I’m sure you don’t feel up to conversation,” he said, “but we’d better keep talking anyway. Keep you awake.”

I groaned a little in acknowledgment, but didn’t say anything.

“I suppose I’ll go first.”

“No.” I wanted to apologize, to thank him for saving my life; anything to stave off the lecture I was sure was coming. But shaking my head upset the delicate equilibrium of my insides, and I started retching again. He handed me the wastebasket just in time for another round of vomiting. “Mm sorry, Hobie,” I offered once it had passed. _For constantly self destructing. That you had to find me like this. For vomiting into an unlined antique waste-bin just now._

“I know you are, Theo. I know.” He patted around his pockets for a handkerchief so I could wipe my mouth. “But—” handing it to me— “not nearly as sorry as I am. I should have stepped in sooner. Years ago, even.” I started to protest, but he held up a hand to stop me. “Let me say this, please. When you came to me you were already practically grown, a fully formed little person. I didn’t want to get in your way, or push, and I didn’t want you to feel like I was trying to replace your parents. Besides, you always seemed to rise to the occasion when I treated you like an adult. But—” rubbing the bridge of his nose— “you clearly needed some pushing. To have someone checking in every day, asking you uncomfortable questions about your whereabouts. Someone insisting on meeting your friends, giving you a curfew. Boundaries.”

The thought of Hobie blaming himself for my addiction horrified me. “This isn’t your fault.”

“Maybe not; I know you’re responsible for your own choices,” he allowed. “And maybe even with more structure you would have still ended up here. But I still failed you as a guardian.”

“You didn’t. You were wonderful.” I rubbed at the tears now running down my face, a mix of standard withdrawal-induced watery eyes and genuine sorrow. “Really, Hobie.”

He chuckled humorlessly. “It’s very kind of you to say so, Theo, but all evidence is to the contrary. I should have looked more closely, seen what you really needed. As the adult that was my responsibility.”

“I didn’t want you to see me,” I admitted with a sniffle. Another wonderful symptom. Soon I would be sneezing every five minutes. “I thought if anyone could tell I was hurting I would be sent away again, maybe to that boarding school, maybe to a group home. I couldn’t show anyone the cracks.” _And I’m a damn good liar_, I added mentally.

“That’s the worst of it,” Hobie said. The look on his face in that moment — I hope I never have to see him so heartbroken again. “That’s why I’m so sorry. Of _course_ I knew you were hurting. But I just let you get on with things, rationalized that time is the best healer. And then I didn’t give you any of the tools you needed to actually heal.”

Not trusting my voice, I reached out a shaky hand, which he took.

He smiled sadly. “I wanted you to have more freedom than Pippa had in that awful Swiss boarding school: so much structure, so stifling. She’s always been an artistic little bohemian. Disciplined, of course, but quixotic and dreamy too. And I so hated to think of her free spirit being smothered by rules and restrictions. But,” he gave my hand a squeeze, “I see now that having structure helped her to heal and thrive, while you’re still so hurt.” His voice broke on this last word, which was enough to turn my leaking eyes into a full flood of tears.

“I’m sorry Hobie, I’m sorry.” I grasped his hand harder, like a child.

“Being hurt is nothing to be sorry for, my boy,” he assured me, just as teary.

The truth is I have no idea how I would have reacted to Hobie actively trying to parent me. When I returned to New York I was traumatized and half feral, as well as mad with a grief I couldn’t name over a loss beyond my dad’s death. Perhaps if Hobie had been in the habit of speaking with me about things — _How was your day? What have you been up to? Have you heard from that friend of yours in Las Vegas? You know, when you put it that way it somehow reminds me of … _— he might have helped me find a name for that loss, might have helped me sort through my various injuries and kept me from my worst self. Then again, perhaps I would have bristled and retreated further into my propensity for self-annihilation. Besides, having already lost every parent figure I’d ever known, Hobie trying to fit himself into that box might have made me even more distrustful of the fragile stability I was able to find at Hobart & Blackwell.

Once we had manfully controlled our tears—to the extent possible with one of us in active withdrawal—I asked the question it had finally occurred to me to ask.

“How did you know? To have Narcan.”

“When you disappeared to Amsterdam it was a bit of a fire drill around here,” he admitted. “Your jilted fiancée was nearly as worried as Pippa and I, once she got over being angry. She shared her concerns about what you might have fallen into. They utterly paled in comparison to my own at the time, but they made me realize the extent of what you had been hiding from everyone. I signed up for Narcan training soon after you came home.”

“You never said anything.”

“No. I failed you again. It’s a ridiculous justification, but I told myself I didn’t want to force a confrontation that might cause you to move out, where I couldn’t help you. But of course I still let you go galavanting across the world buying furniture, because that’s what I selfishly needed you to do.”

I shook my head, doing my best to ignore the way it swam. “It wouldn’t have stopped me anyway. You saying something. I was years in, by that point.” It wouldn’t have stopped me from buying back the Changelings either. That was something I needed to do for myself, as much as for Hobie.

“How long? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“Now? Ten, eleven years. Xandra, my dad’s girlfriend, sold them on the side so there were always plenty of pills around the house.”

Hobie sat back with a whistle. “My god, Theo. Already when you came to live here? I know I sound like a broken record, but can’t say enough how sorry I am.”

I shrugged a bit irritably. It made me uncomfortable that he blamed himself for my actions. My choices have never been stellar ones, and maybe I’ve also been blown about by the winds of chance or whatever poetic bullshit Boris believes, but they’ve always been my own. “Like I said, nothing you could have done.”

“You were a minor child! I could certainly have intervened, called someone. But—” his tone softening in response to my hitching breath— “of course you were worried about being sent away. Though I’m afraid they would have been right to do it.” He waved his free hand at himself. “Unfit guardian. Now,” he changed the subject before I could protest again, “if you’re feeling a bit steadier, perhaps a short walk? Just downstairs. I’d like to lock up the shop.”

“It’s been unlocked this whole time?” The lurch my stomach gave as I flung my legs off the bed could have been from withdrawal, or it could have been pure alarm.

“Yes, well.” Hobie got an arm under me and helped me stand, though I would have been able to manage on my own by then. “Family emergency.”

***

Hobie mostly kept the conversation light during the rest of my observation period, for which I was grateful, although he did manage to pepper in a few reminders that he was always available to talk, and that he would gladly do whatever he could to help me, _please Theo money is no concern_. Of course the worst time to talk to an addict about getting clean permanently is when they are in the agonizing throws of withdrawal, unable to see their way past the bleak and painful present, so after a few monosyllabic grunts from me he graciously dropped the subject.

After that we had a very-nearly pleasant lazy day in. Neither of us are big talkers, so when it became clear that I wasn’t about to die we settled on watching TV on the seldom-used set in the living room. I found TCM, which was showing _Footlight Parade_, and Hobie made tea. Ingenues sang audition songs about love and the moon, Ruby Keeler danced through Dick Powell’s dreams as bathing beauties swam in perfect Busby Berkeley unison, and James Cagney sensitively crooned his way through his best known non-gangster role. For a moment all was peaceful and right. I still wasn’t keeping much down though, so a bit later Hobie called out to a nearby bodega for a delivery of Gatorade and saltines.

And a bit later still I was crying again.

Undoubtedly this was because of the emotional dysregulation of detoxing, but I was also overcome by a sudden and profound sense of loss as I choked down my meager supper. The film had made me think of my mother, and the chemical blue sweetness of the Gatorade, of all things, had made me think of Boris. He’d often had some around, piss warm and stored in half-drunk bottles at the bottom of his backpack. Gatorade was not quite a soda so the vending machines at our school used to carry it. Boris considered it an American delicacy, but I wouldn’t touch the stuff, maintaining my mother’s view that it was processed crap — never mind that I was mainly subsisting on cocktail franks, Doritos, and synthetic pharmaceuticals during those years.

I did try it once, though, and the sense memory was more than I could tolerate in my already wrung out state. My first overdose. Just a mild loss of consciousness, barely a blip, but an eerie symmetry all the same.

I had come to on the couch at my dad’s house with a panicked Boris looming over me, lightly slapping my cheeks. “Potter! Potter, wake up!”

“Get off!” I pushed him away weakly, still drowsy and feeble from whichever of Xandra’s pills we had been snorting.

He remained wide-eyed with alarm, but sat back accommodatingly, giving me breathing room to struggle upright myself.

“Right, I have seen this before, know what we need to do,” he said. “Have to make you throw up.”

“Throw up?” I asked, still not fully aware of what had happened. One minute we had been laughing and imitating Arnold Schwarzenegger’s accent in _Terminator_, and the next Boris had been slapping me in the face. “But I haven’t been drinking.” I hadn’t actually ingested the drugs either, so this mode of trauma response was, medically speaking, bullshit, but what did we know? We were kids, and what’s more we were kids who regularly skipped health class.

“Trust me, Potter. Happened to this guy I know in Ukraine. Used to watch each others backs when I lived on the street.” Unasked, Boris looped an arm around my waist and pulled me to my feet. I stumbled a bit and his arm tightened. “OK?”

I nodded and he helped me towards the bathroom, where he helped me vomit then helped me through it, his touch uncharacteristically and almost unbearably gentle the whole time: my glasses delicately removed from my face, soothing circles rubbed on my back as I retched, a glass of water from the sink held up to my mouth. After escorting me back to the couch, careful arm around me once more, he fished a bottle of Gatorade from his backpack and pressed it on me.

“Drink.”

I wrinkled my nose. “No thanks. I’ve had enough bad tastes in my mouth for one day.”

“No, is like medicine for the throwing up! KT told me this one day. I got last bottle from machine and she come crying to me, ‘Oh Boris! Boris! I have such headache, I was out all last night, having cool party, and then in first period I had to run from geography room to vomit.” He faked a dramatic gag for effect. “You have to share Gatorade with me or I will die and it will be your fault!’ And I am gentleman so we of course split the bottle. Yes—” a solemn hand pressed to his heart—“I have shared spit with KT Bearman. On bottle but still! And while we are drinking we are talking and laughing, and she tells me about good effects for hangover, or for someone who has been throwing up. So does more than taste delicious! Drink up, eh?” He held the bottle out again.

I pushed it away. “It doesn’t taste delicious, it tastes disgusting.”

“Have you ever tried? No. So stop being big baby.”

I crossed my arms and scowled, refusing to give in. He sighed and sat back on the couch, pulling me with him until I was leaned against his chest, our legs kicked up on the cushions. It wasn’t a completely unusual seating arrangement for us, so I went easily enough. We sat for a few minutes gazing vacantly at the end of _Terminator_, Boris’s thumb moving in soft circles over my arm.

“OK _now_ you drink the medicine, big baby,” he announced as the credits rolled, letting go for a moment to unscrew the bottle. He held it up to my mouth.

“But Boris…” I protested weakly.

“Shhh, Potter.” One arm was back around me and his head was dipped beside mine, chin on my shoulder. “No buts.”

Boris was always a very tactile person, especially with me, but usually there was an edge of violence to his touches. An elbow in the ribs, a punch on the shoulder, a full-on wrestling match. That day was the only time I can remember when he was purely gentle, though I admit it’s possible there were others I can’t recall. That’s how I knew, even then, that I had really scared him.

When he next held the bottle to my mouth I drank, resigned and a little contrite. It tasted like sour candy had been left to dissolve in water in the trunk of a car for a month, then that water was bottled and sold to idiot high schoolers. I told him as much.

“So you are saying is delicious and you want more?” he smirked, tipping the bottle at my lips too far so we both ended up covered in Gatorade, shrieking and laughing.

What brought me to tears about this memory was not the symmetry, was not regret and shame over how long ago I went wrong, but rather a kind of desolate jealousy of my former self. In my misery, what I really wanted was that tender, physical comfort, the kind that had been missing from my life for a decade. Boris pulling me close, _Shhh, Potter_; my mother’s fingers running through my hair, _Oh Puppy_.

When the flood began, Hobie left his armchair to sit next to me on the sofa. “Oh Theo.” He rested a broad hand on my back. “You’ve had a hard day, but you’re out of the woods at least. Maybe it’s time for you to head up to bed?”

How cruel that the two people I most wanted there with me I couldn’t have. How beautiful and miraculous that the person there with me instead was Hobie. Honorable, gentle Hobie, with his steady nature and kind heart. Hobie who had taken me in off the street at 15, who taught me so much, who had saved my life more than once, who forgave me and forgave me and forgave me.

I nodded and stood, although I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep without another dose. Hobie stood too, his hand still on my back, and briskly pulled me to him. It was the first time he had hugged me since I showed up at his doorstep all those years ago, but it was every inch as warm and paternal, and just as it had then it made me cry all the harder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If this story cooperates this SHOULD be Theo’s lowest point and things should get less dire from here. This was never intended to be an angst fic! But Theo is just such a mess — and so obviously so that it’s remarkable he really thinks he’s got all these people fooled. Boris, Kitsey, and Hobie all have your number, you big, unstable dummy!
> 
> If you are struggling with addiction, there are resources out there to help you, including in the US the Department of Health and Human Services helpline 1-800-662-HELP (4357) and Narcotics Anonymous, and probably a load of local helplines as well. In the meantime, never use alone! There’s also a resource for that: (800) 484-3731 / neverusealone.com <3


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Readers can have a little character growth, as a treat. 
> 
> Reminder that this fic has no plot and is just an excuse for me to surround Theodore Decker with love and light, and if I have to make everyone weirdly out of character and emotive in order to do that, then so be it!

The night passed. My insides itched. Aware that I could overdose again if I took another hit too soon, I clenched my fists and my jaw and soldiered through it, even though every sound set my nerves on edge, from the wail of sirens outside to Popper’s breathing.

The morning came. Nose running, jaw aching, and insides still itching, I stumbled into the bathroom where I opened every cabinet. I stumbled back to my room and rifled every drawer. Nothing. Then I went back to the bathroom, where I tried the toilet tank and the bottom of the laundry hamper beneath its linen liner, because maybe, just maybe I had hidden it there before passing out. Nothing. I checked everywhere again. Cold reason—which felt, in that moment, quite similar to paralyzing panic—told me there was only one other possible location for what I sought.

Hobie.

Sure enough, when I lurched wild-eyed into the kitchen it sat neatly in front of him alongside his steaming mug of tea. My battered Redbreast Flake tin.

“Have you thrown them out?” I wanted to launch myself at the table, to claw open the tin and see for myself, but I hung back in the doorway. “Please, Hobie,” I begged.

He looked surprised by my question. “Of course not. Why don’t you pour yourself some tea, Theo? We haven’t finished our chat from yesterday, and the pot’s fresh.”

My hands were shaking, but I managed to slosh some tea into a mug.

“Where you go from here is up to you. The rate of relapse is much higher if someone isn’t choosing sobriety for themselves,” he continued matter-of-factly, “and while of course I strongly encourage you to quit, I’m not going to force you.”

I sighed heavily with relief. “Thank you, Hobie. Thank you.”

“Don’t,” he admonished, no doubt uncomfortable with my addict’s gratitude. “I’m not finished. There’s a manilla envelope behind the bread bin, if you’ll grab it for me?”

I retrieved the envelope and took it along with my tea back to the table, where I slid into the chair across from him.

“I’ve been collecting these for a while,” he said, opening the envelope and pulling out a sheaf of glossy papers — brochures advertising the effective and discreet treatment available at a dozen or so clinics: variations on Mr. Barbour’s ‘ding farm’ for addicts.

Hobie pushed the stack over to me. A smiling, multi-ethnic rainbow of clean-cut professionals beamed out from their pages. Sharing confidences in a circle, seated under a blossoming tree like college students who convinced their professor to lecture outside. Doing yoga in studios overlooking the Hudson River. Painting _en plein air _in verdant gardens. Reading peacefully in tastefully-appointed bedrooms. No one crying. No one vomiting, or even sniffling. No one cursing the day they were born. Just page after page of calming, pastel-toned lies to placate worried friends and family. Surely no one with a habit even verging on addiction would be taken in by the brochures. I couldn’t bring myself to touch them.

“You don’t need to decide anything now, or even look a them now,” Hobie assured me, reading the reticence on my face. “I just want you to know that you have options.” He reached for my hand across the pile of papers, and his businesslike tone turned soft. “You’re still so _young_, Theo, though I know you don’t feel it. This doesn’t have to be your whole life. I don’t just mean the drugs, either. I know you feel responsible for the shop, and I probably made things more complicated for you when I added you to the deed, but I want you to know that you can always do something else, choose a new career — leave New York, even. Anything that makes you happy.” He squeezed my hand and let go. “I’ll support you no matter what.”

I had sat woodenly through all of this, stunned and eyes fixed on the grinning models improbably cavorting through rehab. Some part of me hadn’t caught up to yesterday; was still unmoored by this new reality where Hobie knew one of my tenderest secrets, and where we spoke openly about it. I wasn’t sure how to react.

Though, of course, neither was Hobie. Our mutual lack of aptitude at emotional intimacy had him skimming quickly past the fraught topic of institutional addiction treatment without waiting for me to catch up.

He cleared his throat. “The other thing I wanted to discuss is a bit firmer, I’m afraid. I’m an old man, and I don’t think my heart can take a repeat of yesterday, so—” he nudged the tin on the table forward a few inches—“from now on if you want to partake, you’ll have to do so here, with me. I can’t in good conscience let you use unsupervised.”

I reached slowly for the tin with my still-shaking hand. I was waiting for a ‘gotcha’ moment, where Hobie snatched it back and informed me that actually we were heading straight to the hospital. That, in fact, he had called the police to confiscate the drugs and escort me there. But my irrational paranoia was just that, and the familiar tin was soon in my hand.

I ran my fingertips around the rim of the lid and pried it open. There they were. About ten days worth, if I rationed them out at the breakfast table with Hobie. Ten days before we needed to discuss the ludicrous logistics of him supervising my usage. Would Hobie come with me to see Jerome? Would he then carry the drugs on the subway himself, risking being stopped by the cops, or would I be permitted to carry them? Would he stay behind at the shop, but trust me to hand over my full purchase and hold nothing back to use in secret? Did he plan to come with me to parties, or did having other people around allay his concerns about my overdosing and dying alone?

Ten more days of agonizing exposure, my ribs split open every morning and my rancid, shameful, innermost-self on full display, followed by endless hours of the careful pretense that everything was normal and fine. Ten more days of Hobie watching me with troubled eyes. Ten more days of his pity and sorrow and love.

I chose one of the smaller extended release tabs of Oxy. It wouldn’t take the edge off my misery as quickly, but it would delay our having to repeat this scenario for as many hours as possible.

Hobie watched silently as I ground up the pill with the key from the tin. As I cut it into two lines with the topmost brochure from his pile. As I took the rolled bill and quickly snorted both.

“I haven’t been to the pharmacy to refill the Narcan yet, so I should warn you that I’m calling 911 if you pass out,” he said, breaking the unbearable silence. He handed me a napkin, into which I blew my nose. “I’ll try to go this afternoon.”

Then we sat for a few minutes, waiting, my eyes on the floor and Hobie’s eyes on me, worried but warm.

Here then was our new normal, me and this man who cared whether I lived or died. Who, I was finally beginning to understand, saw me not just as a hapless orphan or as a business partner, but as a son.

I hadn’t been anybody’s son in so long.

When I was nine, I spent most of the month of May caught up in some silly, grade-wide drama about Pokemon cards and whether or not Missy Vandermeek came by her epic collection through theft, cheating, or honest capitalism; opinions varied depending on how many of your cards Missy had won. I was at most a bit player in this saga, but it had nonetheless consumed so much space in my head that I’d forgotten to buy a Mother’s Day gift. Normally my dad would have helped me pick something out, but this was around the time that my parents’ marriage really began to fall apart, and gifts for my mother were the last thing on his mind.

When that Sunday rolled around, my mother spent breakfast teasing me.

“Do you think there are some flowers hidden around here somewhere? I had a terrible sneezing fit this morning.” “I forgot to check the mailbox yesterday — I wonder if there are any cards?” “You know Theo, it’s too bad that chocolate isn’t a breakfast food! If someone gave me a box of chocolate I’d eat the whole thing right now.”

“Jesus Christ, Audrey, he gets it!” my father groused. “Kid, give your mom her Mother’s Day gift so she’ll drop it.”

Feeling thoroughly wretched for not remembering, I ran into my room to put together my best attempt at a gift. I dumped all of my Pokemon cards into an empty shoebox: a penitential offering. I hastily made a card using a page of notebook paper and the colored pencils I kept in my desk. I then presented the lot to my mother.

“I’m really sorry mom. I forgot,” I told her tearfully before spilling out the whole tale of Fourth Grade deception, greed, and jealousy that had distracted me.

Gently laughing, she dried my eyes and hugged me. “Oh Puppy, don’t be silly. Don’t you know that having you as a son is the best Mother’s Day present I could ever ask for?”

What kind of disappointing present would it be now?

More to the point, would my mother even recognize such a son? Could she be proud of him? I know she would have still loved me despite it all—Hobie’s misplaced compassion had showed me that—but would I have been able to stomach forcing her to sit and watch me take drugs every morning, then babysit me so I didn’t OD? What an unforgivable thing to make someone who loves you endure.

How then could I put Hobie through this day after day?

“Now then,” Hobie said when it was clear the danger had passed, clapping his open palms on the tabletop. “Why don’t I fix you something to eat?”

“No thanks,” I demurred. “My stomach’s not quite right yet.”

“Alright then.” He pocketed my tin as he stood, then gave my shoulder a squeeze. “I’ll be down in the shop if you need me.” His steady steps thumping like heartbeats down our creaky steps merged with the effect of the pills to bring me my first sense of calm in days.

Head clear at last, I finished my tea and went to the hall closet to get a suitcase.

***

The less said about rehab the better. You can imagine the rough outline of it: a few days of shitting myself and crying, a few weeks of wanting to claw out my own veins, a lifelong craving.

***

Hobie, in his bumbling kindness, arranged for a somewhat awkward homecoming committee, and when I returned home Pippa was there, seated in the kitchen with the Sunday crossword. I hadn’t spoken with her in over a year, and we had only texted sporadically. Less even than I had texted with Boris, whose sometimes months-long silences bothered me so much.

Although I was unprepared for our reunion she’d had time to steel herself, and she set aside her pen and embraced me warmly, enveloping me in her familiar cocoon of scarves and sweaters.

“I’m really proud of you,” she said, drawing back to look me in the eye. Both of us were misty. I didn’t deserve her kindness.

“And I’m really sorry. Pippa, I’m so, so sorry…” I started to tear up, an embarrassing habit I’d been unable to shake since the worst of the withdrawal. She embraced me again.

“I know, I know.”

But she couldn’t really know. I hadn’t told her. And Hobie would never have shared anything he considered my secrets to tell. None of the rationalizations my therapist at the rehab center had helped me name in order to explain—explain, not excuse or defend—the ways that I had objectified and hurt her. Arrested development and mother issues and internalized misogyny and compulsory heterosexuality.

I wanted her to know. “No, you don’t understand. I’m _so_ sorry.”

She pulled back and looked me square in the eye again, steelier this time. “Good. That’s good, Theo. And it was kind of my starting assumption, or else I wouldn’t be back here.”

“Why don’t we let Theo get settled in, Pigeon?” Hobie interrupted gently. “And then we’ll all go to Maurizio’s for dinner? Unless—” catching a glimpse of my pale and anxious face—“Theo would rather order in?”

“No, Maurizio’s will be good,” I assured him. A failing basement bistro with a waitstaff and decor both dating from the mid-fifties, Maurizio’s was about as bustling as my un-opiated nerves were likely to tolerate, especially after the surprise of Pippa, but I was determined that they would tolerate it. (And they did, barely.)

Later that night, smoking cigarettes on the stoop in the warm spring breeze, I finally had the chance to explain myself to Pippa. To confess the various revelations that Dr. Sugiyama had coaxed out of me, making her the third person who knew—knew because they had heard me say it in so many words, not because of our history or because they suspected due to where I live or work—what had always been my biggest secret. A secret I’d often kept even from myself.

Laughter was not the reaction I expected.

“I know it sounds stupid,” I said defensively while she wheezed away on the step next to me.

“No, no, that’s not it!” She wiped a tear of mirth from her eye. “It’s just, you sure do know how to make a girl feel special, huh?” She sobered at my scowl. “I’m not trying to tease you, I promise; it really does make sense when you think about it. Textbook transference, almost. It’s just—” a deep, centering breath—“it took a lot to get me over here, Theo. This was the one place in New York that still felt safe to me, and suddenly it didn’t. I was uncomfortable. _You _made me uncomfortable,” she admitted. “But Hobie swore up and down that you understood what you had done and that you’d never do anything like it again; that you were really changing and growing, but that you needed our support. And then I was picturing you heartbroken and repentant—which I didn’t want to deal with either, to be honest—but he promised that I didn’t have the whole picture, and things could be ok between us if we just talked it through. So I came back, but I practically made him sign a blood oath that you would behave. If he had just _told_ me…” She took a deep drag of her cigarette. “He does know, right?”

“Yes. Him, and you, and my therapist,” I said, stubbing out my cigarette on the step as I listed off my small circle of confidence.

“Hmm. So there hasn’t…_been_ anyone, then?” Did I blush? I must have blushed, or given some other indication of embarrassment. “Wait, no, don’t tell me. Oh I know!” she kicked my foot playfully. “Boris! Right? Why else would you run away to Europe with him? It caused quite a scandal, you know.” I did know; it would have caused more of one if people knew the truth. “And god, the way you used to talk about him. I thought you made him up.”

“People usually do,” I replied, somewhat annoyed that I had already finished my cigarette.

“And you’ve known him since you were 12,” she said sagely, slipping into her Dr. Carmenzind voice. “And you’ve known me since you were 12. And you’ve known Kitsey since you were 12. It’s all coming together.”

I crossed my arms in front of my chest, wishing I still had something to do with my hands. “That doesn’t have anything to do with anything. And I was 13 when I moved to Vegas, actually. And I’ve known Kitsey since I was 10.”

She gave a rueful little laugh. “I’m sorry, Thee, I’m saying all of this wrong. I’m really not trying to tease or psychoanalyze. Just — I get it, you know? That’s when it happened, and your wires got all crossed. My wires got crossed too; I know how it goes.” She stubbed her cigarette out and wrapped her own arms around herself: my funhouse mirror reflection. “Love is obsession is sorrow is shame… It takes a lot of work to untangle it all, but now that you’re actually talking to someone you’ll get better at seeing where you get tripped up.” She grinned. “I can’t believe Theo Decker has grown up and is finally someone who handles his shit.” Had I never heard her curse before, or had I simply purified and sanitized her in my memory?

“You keep saying you’re not trying to tease me, but I’m not sure I believe you,” I grumbled.

She knocked her shoulder against mine. “Sorry. I’m still processing the realization that the moony boy who spent half his life thinking he loves me has actually never been attracted to a woman.” A few months ago someone saying this to me would have sent me running into the street, but I felt only the mild buzz of panic that was more or less my new baseline, and even this was secondary.

“But I really did love you, you know,” I protested, hurt that Pippa would ever think otherwise. “I do love you, I mean. Just—” I shrugged—“not the way I thought I did.”

She smiled one of her brilliant, beautiful, wounded smiles. “I think we have a ways to go before I believe that. But—” getting to her feet—“I am glad I listened to Hobie and came back, because now we can work on being friends.” She offered me her hand and hoisted me to my feet, a sight comical enough due to our respective sizes that I heard some passing teens titter.

***

It was good to have a focus in those first weeks beyond reestablishing routines (boring) and frequent visits with Dr. Sugiyama (boring, depressing). Without Kitsey, Boris, or any of my drug friends, I was left with a social circle consisting more or less solely of Hobie and his crowd of judgmental old ladies. It was nice to have someone my own age—someone who actually liked me—to spend my free time with.

We passed a lot of the time just talking, and I learned more about her in that short period than I'd ever known before. She and Everett had met in a support group for survivors of terrorist attacks: he had been trapped underground for hours during the 7/7 bombings and still suffered from terrible claustrophobia and a fear of the dark (in addition to his terror of elderly Malteses.) Her biggest regret in life was not letting Welty and Hobie officially adopt her, out of a lingering sense of allegiance to her mom. She was actually something of a math whiz — not that this surprised me, mathematical and musical intelligence being very closely linked.

Our extended exercise in getting reacquainted—and mine in making amends—also featured regular short outings around the city: to the movies, coffee shops, non-failing restaurants, parks, bookstores, and the like. Through these excursions Pippa tried to gently nudge me out of my comfort zone. That is to say, to socialize me. Returned fully to myself, without the pills or even much booze, I had lost my ease with customers, with strangers, and in crowds. Legitimate medication had never worked well for me, and though I was in the process of trialing various options I remained both depressed and anxious, and I know I came off as twitchy and odd in company. Accustomed to trauma, Pippa graciously ignored this while still allowing me to call Time when the outside world became too much to bear.

Which is why it was such a surprise that she decided she wanted me to take her to a gallery opening for her final night in New York. An artist she followed on Instagram, whose ouvre was heavily influenced by Frank L. Baum, had recently signed to a trendy gallery owned by an outer satellite of Kitsey’s crowd, a young-ish tech millionaire who called it quits to follow his bliss. His bliss, in this case, being overblown, moralizing installation art. To quote from the gallery website, “Henderson’s ‘Cross of Gold’ probes playfully yet insistently at the intersection between social realism and the utopian, distilling capitalist critique of the Emerald City through the late-capitalist/post-capitalist lens of modern Gotham. Guests who wish to climb the structure should expect to wait in line and must sign a waiver.”

The opening had been listed in _Time Out New York_. It was going to be mobbed.

No one knew about my own little slice of Chelsea real estate besides Dr. Sugiyama, who knew far too much, so at least I was confident the opening wasn’t a calculated part of Pippa’s regimen of exposure therapy. It wasn’t so much that I’d been actively avoiding the area as that I’d been out of town doing healing yoga in gardens, etcetera, but that didn’t mean I was overjoyed at the prospect of staring down the empty storefront—abandoned places always bring me back to the vacant houses of Canyon Shadows—or of battling my way through hundreds of art world sycophants trying to capture the perfect Instagram shot.

But it was Pippa’s last night in New York, and besides the gallery we were visiting wasn’t on the same street as Boris’s. We even took a taxi straight there as a concession to my nerves.

“…but at the end of the day it’s just another useless degree, no matter how respectable the institution,” Pippa was saying, recounting the relative merits of pursuing her PhD at Oxbridge vs. UCL, where she’d been doing her Master’s. She was only using me as a sounding board to talk through a challenge she had been debating for months, and I was only half listening, my head resting on the cool glass of the taxi window. “Sure, I’d be a more competitive candidate for a teaching position, but does that matter if I don’t think I want to teach? Besides, if I’m mostly doing a degree as a way to stay in the UK, and I really only want to stay in the UK so I can be with Everett, does it make any sense to leave London?”

“It doesn’t seem like it does,” I agreed distractedly as we pulled to a stop at a light, knowing this was the answer she wanted based on the half dozen other times we’d had this conversation. As we idled, my eyes were drawn to a building on the street ahead. One with a sign where there hadn’t been one in January.

“Actually, can we get off here?” I asked the driver, suddenly alert. “I need to get out here.” I pulled out my wallet and began to pass him a few bills.

“Theo, is everything OK?” Pippa asked, concerned.

The light turned. “Just let me get through the intersection,” the driver replied.

“Fine,” I replied, to both of them.

I was clambering out the door as soon as we pulled to the curb. Pippa stayed while the driver made change, but I was already a few storefronts down standing in front of a large, darkened window. The same words from the sign above the door were now tastefully etched into the glass.

_Audrey Sabina Arts._

Pippa caught up to me. “What’s going on?”

I couldn’t look away, even though my eyes were reflexively filling with tears. “He named it after them, Pips,” I breathed.

She followed my gaze, and partially understood. “But who is Sabina?”

“Boris’s mom.”

“And this is?”

I was already digging in my pockets for my keys. “An art gallery. Boris bought it for us,” I answered, fumbling to unlock the door that was now repainted and looking as respectable as its neighbors.

“Excuse me?” Pippa’s question came out as an indignant squeal. “Theodore Decker how dare you not tell me about this.”

Why was I so eager to get inside? The lights were out. He clearly wasn’t there.

But he had been. The first thing I noticed when I flipped on the lights was that the door to the back office was ajar. Though the gallery walls were still bare, I could spot a bookshelf through the open door. I pushed forward, Pippa on my heels.

Cluttered and eclectic, the office was Boris all over. A Picasso calendar shared the walls with what looked like a genuine but poorly framed Fuseli drawing, the bookshelf was overflowing with art publications, and the room’s two desks were badly mismatched: a bog standard convertible standing desk, equally overflowing with papers, and a French Louis XVI neoclassical writing desk with a parquetry veneer and gilt-bronze fixtures.

“I take it it didn’t look like this the last time you were here?”

“No,” I murmured, running my hands along a stack of _ArtForum_s piled atop the standing desk. They were dogeared and filled with Post-It flags, as was a copy of Gardner’s _Art Through the Ages_; Boris had been giving himself a crash course on art history and the art world. There was a film of tea still in his mug.

Pippa took note of my reverie. “What happened?”she asked, more gently this time.

“We had a fight.” The calendar was turned to May—Picasso’s ‘La Vie.’ All of the month’s art fairs were marked off on it: Frieze New York, artmonte-carlo, Photo London.

“I knew that much,” she reminded me.

“About the gallery. Because I didn’t want it.” I flipped the calendar to June and saw Basel and Volta and Masterpiece London and my birthday.

“Really? You’ve been so secretive and sad about it I assumed you confessed your feelings and he rebuffed you,” she said, dropping her bag and plopping down in the room’s only seat, an ergonomic desk chair. “And that fits with what I know about, you know—”she spun experimentally in the chair—“your _journey_.”

“I don’t have feelings for Boris,” I denied automatically, drifting towards the most out-of-place item in the room, the 19th century writing desk. I was certain I recognized it from a recent auction catalogue that Hobie had brought along on one of his weekend visits; an attempt to keep me involved in the business from afar.

“Sure,” Pippa agreed cheerfully. “But a gallery does seem like exactly your kind of thing, I would have thought. Why didn’t you want it?”

“Because—” feeling around the back of the desk—“Boris isn’t very reliable, and he’s always off in Europe, and he was inevitably going to stick me with all the work.” Sure enough, there it was: the spot where the smooth hardwood veneer gave way to plain pine patching. It was the same piece.

Pippa _hmmmm_’d and stood, coming over to me. “So instead you left him with all the work.”

“Not really,” I said, mildly annoyed that she was taking Boris’s side. “He didn’t _have_ to do any of this.” I dropped to my knees to inspect the desk’s back legs.

“No he didn’t,” she concurred. “What are we looking at?”

“Nothing much; just a desk. It’s not actually a very good piece. See the stain on the back legs?—” running my hands along them—“Not original. Neither are half the fixtures.” I flicked one I knew to be reproduction. “And the back’s badly patched. But I’ve seen it before. Hobie wanted it for its paneling a couple of months ago, but a phone bidder went high almost as soon as he put his paddle up. He was pretty put out about it.” I stood again, and on my way to my feet I passed Pippa’s smirking face.

“Interesting,” she said. “And here it is. Maybe someone thought Hobie bidding on it meant it was something you would like.”

“Or maybe they just have too much money and no idea about antiques,” I argued, my face heating. “Or as soon as they saw it in person they realized it was junk and tossed it on the street, where Boris picked it up.”

She laughed. “Right. I’m not going to argue with you about the intentions of someone I met once in passing, but remember— ”laying a hand on my upper arm—“you’re allowed to want things. Even if they’re things you don’t think will happen.” She released me and went to grab her bag off the floor. “I know you want to keep poking around in drawers, but I really am excited to see this show, so I’m going to head over. I’ll come back for you in an hour or so. Sound good?”

“Sure.” I did want to keep poking around — I wanted to know how far Boris had gotten with things. Was the business incorporated? Has he signed any artists? Did he have any shows planned? “Lock up when you leave though so no one can come wandering in.” I passed her my key.

“OK.” She gave the scarf I was wearing a little tug. “And when I come back we’re going to talk. An hour should be enough time for you to figure out why a man might give you real estate.”

I wrinkled my nose at her implication. “Gross, Pippa. Hobie’s given me real estate.”

She laughed again and turned to leave. “Yeah well, Hobie loves you. Also, multiple men giving you New York City real estate?—” shaking her head—“I hope you realize that you’re a ridiculous person and your life is ridiculous.”

If she had been anyone else I would have flipped her the bird, but she was Pippa so I merely waved her off and hid my blush by moving to inspect the bookshelf.

With scant knowledge of where to begin, it looked like Boris had simply visited the Met gift shop and purchased every single popular art volume. Serious exhibition catalogues sat alongside comic book biographies of Leonardo DaVinci and coffee table books about dogs in art. This last was filled with Post-It flags which, on inspection, all seemed to be marking pages featuring pictures of little white dogs. _Popchyk!!! _Boris had scrawled on one highlighting ‘Camille with a Small Dog’ by Monet. _Art Through the Ages_ and the stack of _Artforum_s were similarly annotated, and I longed to page through everything and see the rest of Boris’s always-distinctive marginalia.

Contrary to what Pippa might believe, the enormity of the actualized gallery was not lost on me. I knew the antique desk was for me. I knew the gallery name was too. I understood that Boris’s study of the art world indicated genuine interest and an attempt at making a go of things. I knew, as I’ve always known, that he cared about me, and in much the same way that he always has: as a friend and a brother.

But Pippa didn’t know him like I did—his capricious and fleeting enthusiasms, his insatiable curiosity about the world, his profligate generosity—so she couldn’t see how characteristic the whole undertaking was. He would buy me a beautiful chair to go with my beautiful desk and then not show up for a month. He would grow bored with the amount of administrative work required to run an honest business and spend most of his time on his more profitable enterprises. He would rent a booth at one of the art fairs on his calendar and then never come back from Europe. And this cycle of having him and losing him would kill me.

Still, I allocated myself the next hour for my mind to meander over a world where Pippa’s implications were true. Where Boris’s earnest interest in this new trade would be enough to sustain his engagement, to keep him here. Where he was like me, rather than married with three children. Where the gallery was a declaration.

Before long, I heard the key turn in the door and the click of Pippa's shoes on the gallery's concrete floors."That was quick," I called. “How was the line?”

Pippa didn’t respond, though the footsteps continued. Instead a different, equally familiar voice murmured, full of wonder, "You came back." 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stay tuned to see how Theo and Boris will manage to fuck up their reunion! Because I'm sorry to tell you this: they definitely will.
> 
> Also, please let me know if you ever actually played with your Pokemon cards. I wouldn’t even know how! I thought Pokemon cards were exclusively for hoarding.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Boris is back, babey!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m not really happy with this chapter, which feels half-baked and OOC to me, but I know we all need escapist content right now so I went ahead and posted. This fic is hard to write because it’s first person, and would Theo realistically ever confess to tenderness? He would not! So this will be an OOC mess from here on out, sorry.

There are moments in life, rare and breathtaking moments, where daydreams and reality seem to merge and flow into one another. When a long-imagined future becomes reality, or when reality eclipses the borders of even your most outlandish imaginings. Although I’d most often experienced this sort of euphoric delirium while under the influence of MDMA, even a gloomy bastard like me—clinically depressed since childhood; an avowed nonbeliever in any higher power or purpose—was not wholly unfamiliar with this sensation of an overwhelming synchronicity between circumstance and desire and destiny, of the bright edges of the world knitting together exactly as they should. In these moments, life can almost seem like a lucid dream — as though you, the dreamer, are creating the world as you go. As though even your wildest fantasies are attainable, if only you would dare.

Boris walking into the gallery felt like that. Like I had summoned him there by dreaming.

I had been paging through the marginalia in his copy of _Art Through the Ages_, indulging in an imagined world where he had just stepped out for a coffee, and once he returned we would resume planning our first show. And another where Pippa ran into him at the opening and brought him back with her. Another where I texted him a picture of me at his desk and he came running. A darker fantasy where some of his gangland enemies invaded the gallery and we had to fight them off together; another where he rescued me. Still another where I found a long, explanatory letter tucked in the pages of the book I was reading and, overcome, raced somewhere I knew I could find him for our tearful reunion.

And suddenly there he was, right in front of me, as lanky and hollow-eyed as ever and wearing a rumpled tracksuit — the most underdressed I’d seen him since Antwerp.

“You came back,” he murmured, stepping towards me, hand out, reaching.

For a second it seemed like all the things I’d been imagining were not only possible, but that they were happening.

Then he clapped me roughly across the cheek, grinning. “Knew you’d come back!” he exclaimed. “Put some art and big books in a room and you come running like bear to honey, eh?” Boris flicked the open page of the giant tome on my lap. “Do not like Greek arts, but don’t you think statue looks like Shirley? I want to show him but book is too big to carry around, and I tried to take picture but looked shitty; page is too shiny, I think. Will have to think of good excuse to get him here. Maybe now you are back he will come say hello!” He stood back and surveyed the office. “What do you think? I have done excellent job, yes? Made it ready for when you are ready. And here you are!” He punched my shoulder playfully.

There I was.

But suddenly I didn’t want to be. My hopes humiliated, I was overcome by despair and the need to escape as quickly as possible. There was no declaration here, just Boris’s casual disregard for my earlier objections. The world I had imagined wasn’t real after all.

“No, no, no,” Boris protested as I let _Art Through the Ages _crash to the floor, bolting without a word.

Before I reached the front door of the gallery, sinewy arms encircled me and pulled me back. “Please stop running away from me. Please,” he muttered in my ear, arms tightening. “Is getting ridiculous.”

“Fuck you,” I spat, breaking free from his grasp and shoving him away roughly. My shift from shame to rage was as rapid as my previous change from hope to despair. “Fuck you, Boris. Running away from you? What would be the point? You disappear all on your own.”

“You do, it’s true! You have left me behind many times,” he explained reasonably, palms spread in supplication. “Las Vegas, bar on Avenue C, Antwerp, restaurant on Avenue C…few months ago right here!”

“Jesus Christ. On the run from Child Services—” I began listing explanations off on my fingers, movements exaggerated and sarcastic— “was reeling from shock and betrayal because _you_ robbed me; my life is in New York not goddamn Belgium; panic attack — and fuck you again for bringing that up, by the way; and storming out is not the same as running away! You do realize you could have contacted me literally any time in the last three months? But hey, out of sight out of mind, right?”

“Never out of mind!—” taking a step forward, hand to heart, solemn— “Thought of you every single day. Did you see the desk? And I have been scouting rising artists — lots of graduation shows this month. Kept good notes. Took pictures. We can look over them together!”

“So glad you found a hobby that reminds you of me. You still could have bothered to call at, again, literally any time. Fuck… text, fax, carrier pigeon, send a goon to the shop!”

He waved dismissively. “Knew you would come back eventually. You always do. Did not want to rush you! It is like the saying about the bird: let it fly away and if it’s yours it will come back when it’s ready—” one of his existentialist shrugs— “You were not ready, so I let you go, and now you’re back.” By his lopsided grin, I could tell he thought this explanation both sufficient and charming.

I tugged on my hair, seconds away from pulling out clumps of it in frustration. “I’m not a bird, Boris, I’m a human man. One who generally assumes that people who have nothing to do with him _want_ nothing to do with him. You seriously dropped the fucking ball here.”

“How do I drop ball?—” eyebrows furrowing now in puzzlement— “You were angry because you thought I would not take the gallery seriously, but haven’t I proven that I will take seriously? I will show you. I am good businessman! ”

Between the emotional whiplash and the frustration of realizing Boris still didn’t understand my grievances, I was starting to feel insane.

“How—” another tug at my hair— “are you so obtuse? I don’t give a _shit_ about the gallery. I’m angry because you forget I exist for weeks and months and years at a time, and then, after the last time we fought about that, you proceeded to do the _exact _same thing again. You act like I’ll always be there, waiting for you to come pick up the pieces of our friendship whenever you can be bothered to remember.”

None of this seemed to register. Trying to articulate your frustrations to someone who is staring at you blankly, seemingly not taking in anything you’re saying, is even more frustrating than whatever incited your tirade in the first place.

“So is problem that I am not serious, that I forget about you, or that I take you for granted?”

“All three!”

“Pah! Problem is you are too sensitive, Potter. Like a woman.”

What followed was in no way a repudiation of the patient, painstaking work Dr. Sugiyama had been doing with me three times a week to unlearn my deeply ingrained attitudes about masculinity and the validity of vulnerability and weakness. A few months of therapy are simply not enough to overpower a lifetime of societal conditioning. Or half a lifetime of knowing Boris and how to deal with him when he gets too cocky and dismissive.

Reader, I punched him.

And it felt wonderful. The rush of my fist crashing into the sharp underside of Boris’s jaw was an ideal way to make my frustrations inescapably understood without having to perfectly articulate them.

And Boris, previously so careful of me, fought back. I returned his glancing blow to my torso with another uppercut of my own.

Though I hadn’t punched anyone in nearly a decade, my kinesthetic memory was activated by that first swing. A physical fight between Boris and I was a familiar, comfortable ritual: the sound of our snarling, the ache in my knuckles, the rush of adrenaline. Only the burning sun and the blur of vodka were missing.

We each knew the other’s style well enough to block about half of one another’s shots, but we had changed sufficiently in the years since Vegas to land the other half. My fist to his nose. His fist to my unguarded gut. Me stepping forward when he would have expected me to retreat. Him suddenly changing tactics and tackling me around the waist, transforming our ballet of pugilism into a wrestling match.

The gallery’s concrete floor made for a harder landing than the rubber matting of the playground, and if it weren’t for our desperate twisting on the way down I might have cracked my head. As it was, Boris’s shoulder took the brunt of the impact, and his wince gave me a momentary advantage that I lost almost immediately and never quite regained.

On the ground our fight was more unpredictable. Now that we were fully grown, I wasn’t so tiny and easy to pin down, and between swimming and forced therapeutic yoga I was more limber than I’d ever been. Meanwhile the comparative bulk of Boris’s arms helped protect his armpits, once so vulnerable to jabbing, and he had fewer sharp angles with which to jab in return.

My vision was a blur—at some point my glasses must have been knocked aside—but the rough outline of him was more than enough to rail against. I was running on pure instinct and fury.

We grappled away. Him on top, his knee to my kidneys. Me on top, my arm across his windpipe. Him on top again, forcing my arms above my head, face a red and bloody blur. Was I also bleeding? My face was hot and wet, but I couldn’t remember any of Boris’s punches getting me in the nose.

“Enough! That is enough,” he growled, cutting through my bemusement. “You need to breathe, Potter.”

But I couldn’t. Was my windpipe crushed? Did I have a broken rib? How could Boris demand that I breathe when he was laid fully on top of me?

“That’s it. In. Out. Vse khorosho, uspokoysya. In. Out. Can you do deeper? I will show you, but you must promise not to hit me.” He released my left wrist from where it was pinned above my head and brought it to rest on his own chest. “Big breath in.” He demonstrated. “Good. Slow breath out.”

We continued like this for a few minutes, and between his weight, his steady voice, and the gradual return of oxygen to my brain the crazed animal frenzy went out of me.

“You OK?” he asked far too gently for someone I had recently given a black eye and a bloody nose.

“Oh god—” realizing, grasping his shirt with the hand still held over his rhythmically beating heart—“you’re bleeding.”

“Yes, you got my nose good!” He released my wrists to probe his face gingerly. “But do not think it’s broken. Too bad! Thought maybe now I could get fixed without big lecture about cocaine.” He sat back on his heels, still straddling my waist. "You ready to get up?”

I interpreted this as a directive, and tried to sit up with him still on top of me. The post-fight adrenaline crash had sucked the aggression from me and left me feeling dopey and slow.

“Guess not!” he said amiably. “We will stay down here a while longer. Now tell me—” dismounting, crouching beside me—“did you hit your head?”

“Am I bleeding?” I touched my head, confused.

“Not like me! And not from head.” He held up a few fingers. “Can you tell how many?”

“I don’t know — can’t see. Lost my glasses.”

Boris chuckled and gently removed these from my face, where they had been sitting all along. “Sorry, was bad question. Wipe your eyes and then try.”

While I scrubbed at my eyes, which were wet and swollen, Boris cleaned my glasses as best he could on the hem of his tracksuit jacket. When he placed the frames back on my nose I saw he was holding up his whole hand.

“Five.”

“Good.” He dropped his raised hand to my head and briskly ran it through my hair, feeling for tender spots. ”Well, I think you are not concussed. Does anything else hurt?”

I assessed the rest of my body, from my toes on up. My muscles were sore, especially in my torso, but above all else my knuckles ached. I flexed them with a wince. “My hands.”

He settled cross-legged on the floor next to me and took my hands, gently probing my knuckles with his thumbs. “No broken skin, which usually means no broken bones.” He turned my hands over and prodded the palms, before examining the length of each of my fingers. “This one—” brushing over my right pointer finger as I flinched—“is jammed, but we will tape up, then good as new. And knuckles definitely bruised!” He held my right hand closer to his face to inspect it, and for a moment I thought… But then he lowered it—though he didn’t drop it—and grinned. “Got off easy! Still fight like a wild man. No technique, just anger! Best way to get hurt.”

But I didn’t feel angry any more, only deflated. The rage and the energy had both gone out of me, and I was left empty of everything except the bleak devastation I’d felt when he first clapped me on the cheek. I wanted to curl up right on the buffed concrete.

I sighed and tried to pull out of his grasp. “I’m tired, Boris. I think I just want to go home.”

Boris, stubbornly, wouldn’t let me go. “I know you are, I know. But we should talk, yes?That is why I come here. I have many things to say, and the first — the first is that I am sorry. I did not listen to you, and this hurt you.”

I jerked my hand away hard. “Well, I am too sensitive.”

By his bitten lip I could see he still thought this true, but he objected anyway. “No, I am too insensitive! Forget how you have suffered because of people who have left you. Deserve to be punched in the face! And remember I am very stupid, so you have to spell out when you are upset. Say to me, ‘Boris, I do not like when I do not hear from you. It makes me feel like you forget me and you do not treasure our long friendship. Please let us talk every day.’”

“I did! I did say that,” I protested. Not that I had begged to have his attention daily, but the rest of it I had expressed, more or less.

“And I did not understand! Because I did not listen for your true meaning!—” his hand clasped earnestly to his breast again—“Should not take violence for two such friends to understand each other. Let us speak plainly, clear the air. Please.” He held out a hand to help me from the ground. I hesitated.

“This is not good place for talking,” he explained. “No chairs.”

“But I’m really, really tired, Boris,” I objected tearily, shaking my head. “I don’t want to go talk in some bar.” All I wanted was to climb under a weighted blanket in a cool, dark room and try to sleep.

“Not some bar,” he agreed. “Need to get cleaned up, anyway. Show you my place?”

“You have a place?” I tentatively took his still-extended hand and allowed him to pull me up.

“Where you think I sleep? You think I have Gyuri drive me around in back seat all night like colicky baby?”

“I dunno, a hotel or something.”

He scoffed. “For months and months? I am rich man but I am not that rich—” one hand resting lightly on my back, leading me towards the door— “Besides, real estate is good investment.”

“OK,” I agreed tiredly, reasoning that his place was better than mine. At mine we’d need to contend with Hobie and Pippa. “Pippa!” I remembered, stopping dead. “I came here with Pippa — I can’t leave her.”

“Relax! Text her.”

I dug in my pocket for my phone. The screen—only slightly cracked from the time it had spent between me and a concrete floor—showed a text notification from a few minutes earlier.

_In good hands. Will see you at home! _Pippa had written, underneath a photo of herself atop a monstrous installation that looked like it had been constructed by the crew of an elementary school production of The Wizard of Oz. _My love to Boris._

“Myriam is giving her ride home,” Boris said smugly, peering over my shoulder. “She also likes shitty art so they will have much to talk about. Don’t look so worried! We will not have such ugly thing here.”

Selling ugly art was not at all what I was worried about. “How on earth?” I asked, bewildered.

“Not following you! Honest! Have been giving you lots of space,” he said, pushing his way outside, holding the door. “Myriam really does like shitty art, and also maybe girl who works at Threshold — the gallery where your redhead was tonight. She spotted her and called me right away!” A yellow cab was idling in front of the gallery, waiting for us. “Rushed here as soon as I could, but my place is almost half hour by car,” Boris explained. “Could not wait for Gyuri to come pick me up.”

“But how does she know Pippa?”

With a snort, Boris locked the gallery door behind us. “Is Myriam’s job to know what I know. Besides, not like you have very wide circle of friends!” He opened the cab door and ducked his head inside. “Thank you for waiting!” he told the driver, a disinterested Egyptian who continued his _sotto voice_ Bluetooth conversation rather than acknowledging his fare returning covered in blood. I glanced back at the gallery window, wary of what the man might have seen, but I didn’t get a long look before Boris pushed me into the taxi and climbed in after me. “Back to same address!” he said.

As the car pulled away from the curb, I once again rested my head against the cool window. I felt Boris’s eyes on me.

“Does this still happen to you a lot?” he asked quietly.

“Does what happen?”

“So many feelings in so short a time? And so big! Too big for your body to hold them all. Then after they explode out you are like this, so empty and sad — or worse, you don’t respond to anything. Happened a lot when we were kids, but I thought was from drugs and alcohol. We mixed crazy combinations sometimes! But now I think maybe something else?”

I shrugged. He sounded like Dr. Sugiyama, but I was, as he’d noted, empty; too empty to engage.

He watched me for a long moment. “OK,” he sighed. “If you want to sleep, should not use window as pillow.” He tugged me to him, settling my head on his shoulder. “I am little bit softer then glass.”

I snorted, which made him beam. “Ah! There he is! Short nap and you will be fine — I will shut my big mouth so you can rest.”

“Don’t get blood on me,” I muttered, gratefully shutting my eyes. Not that I expected to nap; I was still hopeless at sleeping without drugs. Still, the pretense meant he wouldn’t try to make conversation for the duration of the ride.

He responded by turning his bashed-up face into my hair. “Oops.” I pinched him in retaliation and he snickered, turning away again but keeping his cheek pressed to the top of my head.

Against the odds, I dozed off like this, lulled by the gentle motion of the taxi and the sound of murmured Arabic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is it clear from the way I wrote the fight that Theo was trying to hurt Boris, but Boris was taking care not to hurt Theo/make sure Theo doesn’t hurt himself? I just don't know! Like I said I'm not particularly happy with this chapter, but life is hard and we need tenderness. 
> 
> Art Through the Ages is THE gigantic art history textbook. I know at some point in the novel Theo reads an art history textbook at Hobie’s, and I thought this might be the one, but I couldn’t find the passage so clearly it’s not. Pointers welcome if you know what I’m talking about.
> 
> I hope that everyone is staying safe and practicing good hand hygiene and social distancing. Sending love from New York (where I am fully self-quarantining for the foreseeable future!)

**Author's Note:**

> Don’t worry too much about the title or what this fic is “about.” At the end of the day this is just a rambling, plot-light Goldfinch continuation, because I am a lunatic who finished the book and thought, “I would like to spend more time in the head of Theodore Decker!” I had three ideas going, one of which was just this title, another of which was a plot point that’s going to come up in Chapter 2, and the third which isn’t going to come up until close to the end, and I decided fuck it I will cobble these all together and people can read it or not!


End file.
